BGSU-based program evaluates HIV prevention efforts in Ohio

Nearly one-third of homosexual African-American men between the ages of 23 and 29 now have the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year.

Between 1988 and 2000, about 15 percent of that population was infected annually, according to a six-city study by the CDC.

Statistics like these point to the need for continued HIV prevention efforts, and in Ohio, BGSU is charged with evaluating such programs.

This year, faculty in the University’s College of Health and Human Services are working with a $150,000 grant from the Ohio Department of Health to gauge the effectiveness of prevention programs administered by public and private agencies statewide.

Among the specific plans of the Ohio HIV Evaluation and Training Program is organization of a “prevention-for-positives” workshop for interested agencies that have received grants for prevention programs, known as Health Education/Risk Reduction programs.

The workshop’s name refers to an emphasis, emanating at the federal level, that’s less on people who are considered at risk for contracting the virus and more on those who are already HIV-positive, according to Christopher Dunn, criminal justice and associate dean of the College of Health and Human Services.

The goal is to make prevention programs more effective by targeting people who would be the ones transmitting the virus, said Dunn, also one of the evaluation program leaders.

Judy Adams, medical technology; Glenn Shields, director of the Social Work Program, and Dunn have assumed the leadership role for the program’s fourth year based at the University. Jeanne Wright, applied health science, directed the program the last three years.

During the Clinton administration, prevention efforts focused more on trying to reach high-risk segments of the population in the community, including attempts to disseminate information in gay bars and other places where people deemed most at risk could be found, Dunn said.

Those types of interventions have continued, but some organizations conducting them haven’t been ready to do evaluation, nor have their clients been very interested in providing information, he said.

How best to reach that population at other locations is among the questions the evaluation program leaders are considering, Adams noted.

Information has also been collected at HIV-testing sites, which have been willing to ask people to complete a questionnaire about their HIV prevention attitudes and behaviors when they come for testing, and again when they return for the results a couple weeks later. Analysis is conducted using the pre- and post-test data, but the advent of rapid testing for HIV, in which results are known immediately, is closing that opportunity for data collection.

“The rapid testing technology is causing us to adopt a different approach,” said Dunn, adding that because HIV testing is anonymous, researchers have to figure out if they can even contact people later without violating their confidentiality.

Also complicating matters is the lack of a requirement for agencies to evaluate their prevention programs. Without a mandate—and being busy—many agencies haven’t taken the time to collect information for evaluation, Adams said.

Getting past that hurdle is another challenge for the BGSU-based program, which has a part-time student worker and plans to hire two full-time staff to help programs develop their readiness for evaluation and collect data.

“We really need to work with these prevention programs in the cities and find out how we can help them develop their own capacity for evaluation,” said Dunn. “If we can describe how these programs work and provide descriptive information about what they think is successful with clients, they can go on and collect information about parameters they identify as important.”