A significant number of community-based organizations and projects currently function within urban Baltimore city providing services for street and placed outreach, mobile unit screening, testing and counseling to gender-culture-age-sexual orientation specific populations. The need is for increased opportunity to expand their capacity to maintain connections with their post-test HIV-positive clients for advancement of the continuum of care to access to primary medical care. Therefore, it is proposed that community-based organizations in the network would expand the role of HIV outreach workers to the role of HIV outreach counselors which includes tracking hard-to-reach higher risk female clients during the post-test HIV period (case-management) to the time that the results are available for advancing to primary medical care. The outreach worker's added value to current HIV prevention services will be to assist the primary medical care provider agency (health service) in the measurement of the client's denial, fatalism and self-efficiency which is expected to affect HIV help-seeking and treatment adherence health outcomes. Techniques to be used in carrying out the capacity-building trainings include: facilitation of peer-to-peer education programs; implementation of train-the-trainer process; mentoring process for staff development and conducting face-to-face interviews with pre-test females of child-bearing age that are at higher risk for HIV infection. To this end, the Morgan State University Center for HIV Prevention, Evaluation, Policy and Research has actively engaged in the process of partnership building to advance HIV prevention education, community mobilization and community organization for health improvement of African-Americans residing in urban communities of Baltimore City.
Learning Objectives: At the successful completion of the presentation, participants will be able to: 1. Discuss one approach to formally collaborating with faith-based organizations, community-based organizations, organized health care systems and historical black colleges and universities for culturally responsive community outreach strategies. 2. Articulate the advantages of increasing the knowledge and skills of outreach workers, counselors and health providers about the system of primary medical care for PLWA's the Ryan White network of services who are then able to access the system for African-American clients. 3. Describe a training program that teaches staff from non-traditional points of entry for HIV services to utilize to direct, follow and sustain clients for primary medical care in traditional and expanded HIV care settings.
Keywords: Community Collaboration, Health Workers Training
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
Disclosure not received
Relationship: Not Received.