“Ending HIV needs to be more than just a slogan,” said Paul Kawata, NMAC’s Executive Director. “We need effective planning and strategizing to ensure that PrEP and TasP receive more widespread use in communities of color and marginalized populations that are bearing a greater HIV burden. That means including these communities in studies, ensuring that they have access to health care providers whom they trust, and that outreach efforts are culturally sensitive. It’s a big task but an absolutely vital one. This report outlines strategies to reach and effectively serve these communities.”
The report’s specific recommendations for communities of color include:
Focus on the South and strengthening healthcare infrastructure.
Promote biomedical HIV prevention tools through community education and awareness campaigns.
Strengthen health literacy and increase health system navigation services.
Combat stigma associated with HIV and PrEP.
Train more providers to be equipped to navigate across cultures and communities and provide effective HIV treatment and prevention.
Expand the scope of sexual health clinics.
Adapt service delivery to reach people of color.
Actively counter mistrust of providers and the health system.
Cultivate a diverse workforce of health researchers and professionals trained in applying multidisciplinary approaches.
The report also includes recommendations for specific populations, including transgender people of color, gay and bisexual men of color, cisgender women of color, and adolescents and young people of color.
This report is the second part of a two-part report, Blueprint for HIV Biomedical Prevention. NMAC and its partners conducted more than 20 interviews with a diversity of stakeholders in the summer of 2016 to inform the first part, the State of the State Report, and used those interviews as the starting point to distill a focused list of recommendations to expand access to biomedical HIV prevention in communities of color. The recommendations were also informed by discussions that took place at two conferences hosted by NMAC: the National HIV PrEP Summit in December 2016 and the National Biomedical HIV Prevention Summit in December 2017.
