Assessing outcomes of a statewide adolescent HIV prevention services initiative

Issues: Large-scale HIV prevention initiatives often fund community-based organizations to design programs tailored to their constituencies. While it is desirable for programs to provide services to meet the specific needs of their target populations, this creates the challenge of assessing the effectiveness of the overall initiative. The identification and use of common outcomes could assist in creating a unified initiative and improving individual program performance. Description: A state health department funds 27 community-based programs to provide HIV prevention services to youth in a wide range of communities and settings. Through a collaborative process, department staff, service providers and a university partner identified the following core HIV prevention outcomes of the initiative: increases in knowledge about HIV/STI; positive changes in attitudes and beliefs about HIV/AIDS; increases in condom use; and increases in the number of youth who know their HIV status. A tool to compile information on each outcome was developed and pilot-tested. Lessons Learned: The process of identifying core outcomes and piloting the outcome monitoring tool sparked productive discussions about how programs are designed to serve youth. The data compiled created new perspectives for assessing the initiative and tools for providing technical assistance for program improvement. Recommendations: Building on the experience of the adolescent services initiative, the department will develop an instrument for gathering data on core outcomes from all funded HIV prevention programs. Analysis of the data will assist in fine-tuning the core outcomes, and inform program improvement efforts and resource allocation decisions.