Recently, four organizations committed to HIV/AIDS care and prevention (each awarded $250,000 from the Kaiser Permanente National Community Benefit Fund at the East Bay Community Foundation) met for the first time as a group to discuss their projects and prepare for a rigorous evaluation process designed by the University of California San Diego.
As part of the health organization’s long-standing commitment to prevention and reducing health disparities, Kaiser Permanente has the Community-Based HIV Test and Treat Initiative (TTI) that supports agencies whose work is designed to establish communities as places where new HIV infections are rare, and where every person — regardless of age, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or socio-economic circumstance — will be aware of their status and have unfettered access to high-quality, life-extending care, free from stigma and discrimination.
Ultimately, the purpose of TTI is to improve early identification of new HIV cases and to increase the HIV care acquisition and maintenance of newly diagnosed individuals in minority communities disproportionately affected by the HIV epidemic. Four additional organizations will be chosen in late 2013.
We’ll be sharing interviews with people about this initiative over the next few days. In this first video, Kaiser Permanente’s Alexandra Caraballo and Pamela Schwartz, both of Kaiser Permanente, talk about the Community-Based Test and Treat Initiative.
The University of California, San Diego developed an evaluation design and tools to document the impact of TTI on improving testing and linkage to HIV care. In this clip, Dr. Anita Raj, PhD, of the University of California, San Diego, speaks about the importance of the evaluation process.