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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

James E. Skinner, MSW and Cristina A. Booker, MPH. Public Health and Epidemiology, Abt Associates, 4550 Montgomery Avenue, Suite 800 North, Bethesda, MD 20814-3343, 301 634-1780, James_Skinner@abtassoc.com

The Mental Health HIV Services Collaborative (MHHSC) demonstration project, funded by CMHS/SAMHSA, seeks to enhance culturally competent mental health services to people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH/A) in underserved communities. Twenty U.S. community-based organizations (CBOs) provide services in primarily Latino and African-American communities and the Abt Associates Coordinating Center (CC) provided technical assistance (TA) and trainings to enhance culturally competent clinical service provision. The CC created an ongoing forum for the discussion and increased understanding of cultural competence at the service delivery level where clinicians interface with clients to do difficult and rewarding work.

This presentation will describe the MHHSC project's tenets of cultural competence and discuss promising practices in culturally competent mental health care at CBOs, including culturally and linguistically relevant clinical tools, multi-disciplinary and diverse staffing models, multi-lingual programming, mobile services to reach clients who are homebound or located in remote rural areas, untangling co-occurring conditions, integrating consumers' traditional health beliefs and herbal remedies in services, and engaging mental health consumers to provide feedback to improve services. Client recruitment, retention and improved outcomes rely upon the cultural competence of clinicians, evaluators and other CBO staff.

Reaching underserved PLWH/A in need of mental health care requires tailored TA to expand CBOs' capacities to respond to the dual challenges of HIV and mental health. Clinical forum discussions, training needs surveys, and post-training evaluations indicated that frontline clinicians' need TA and training on HIV and families, self-care, ethical issues, cultural formulation, and addressing spirituality, trauma, and domestic violence in mental health services.

Learning Objectives:

• Increase participants' understanding of goals of Mental Health HIV Services Collaborative (MHHSC)
• Define cultural competence as applied by the MHHSC and a process for understanding at the service delivery levels
• Share what community based mental health and HIV/AIDS organizations have done to increase capacity and optimize client outcomes using culturally competent strategies
• Discuss promising practice clinical models that can be replicated
• Increase understanding of technical assistance for capacity building

Keywords: Mental Health Services, Cultural Competency

Related Web page: www.abtassociates.com

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No