316943
Training community health workers to optimize social media technologies to reach special populations
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
: 12:30 p.m. - 12:50 p.m.
Amy Ansehl, DNP, FNP-BC,
Partnership for a Healthy Population, New York Medical College School of Health Sciences and Practice, Valhalla, NY
Hudson Valley Community Services, Inc. (HVCS) is located in New York State’s Hudson Valley, and is the largest and most comprehensive provider of HIV/AIDS services in the region. The agency serves 7 counties, and for the past 3 decades it has supported HIV-positive people who live at or below the poverty level, and those who are high risk for new HIV infections. The agency’s holistic services include case management, transportation, nutrition, support groups, housing assistance, legal services, mobile van outreach, prison services, regional prevention services for sexually transmitted infections (STI’s), Hepatitis C, including the men who have sex with men (MSM population). A Regional Training Center developed by Hudson Valley Community Services provides a range of services to community health workers and others via classroom, webinars and other internet modalities. The integration of social media leverages the agency’s ability to connect to the most hard to reach and vulnerable minority populations, such as MSM and high risk heterosexuals. Best practices are evaluated to identify strategies for reaching each community. Evaluated platforms by HVCS include webinars, pod casts, mobile technologies/texting, social networks, and evaluation dashboards. Evidence –based approaches including the World Health Organization strengthening community systems and toolkits from the Centers for Disease Control enable community health workers to effectively reach out and retain hard to reach populations. These approaches and lessons learned will be detailed so that other community –based initiatives can design and implement a sustainable policy-based approach to optimize the utilization of social media for their respective populations.
Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Advocacy for health and health education
Assessment of individual and community needs for health education
Communication and informatics
Diversity and culture
Learning Objectives:
Identify a minimum of 5 strategies to gain access to hard to reach communities at risk for HIV infection utilizing social media
Discuss evaluation strategies and a minimum of 3 vitals lessons learned from the field
Keyword(s): Social Marketing, Minority Health
Presenting author's disclosure statement:Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am qualified to be an abstract author and presenter because of my extensive work in public health in the area of chronic disease prevention. For example for more than 5 years I have been the HIV Council Co-Chair for Westchester County, New York. I am also on the board of directors for Hudson Valley Community Services. I am an assistant dean and associate professor of public health practice at New York Medical College
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines,
and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed
in my presentation.
