Enabling environments promote access and uptake of clinical services at an HIV prevention project for sex workers in Mysore, India

Increasing sex workers’ access and utilization of health care services is a key part of HIV prevention. An HIV prevention project in Mysore, India has been particularly successful in fostering a new norm of health care seeking among the local sex workers while facilitating community ownership of health care delivery. This paper describes how the use of occupational health ideologies, along with the creation of enabling environments facilitated uptake of project healthcare services, transformed power relations between sex workers and their healthcare providers and led Mysore’s sex workers to initiate health enhancing actions that reached beyond project imperatives to serve self-identified community needs.