HRSA SPNS Border Health Initiative

All Projects Conference Call

May 14, 2001 @ 10:30 am

 

 

 

 

Participants:

 Luiza Amodeo, John Wiebe, Michael Tarter, Marisa Olivares, Rosana Scolari, Mari Zuniga, Alisa Olshefsky, Ray Stewart, Tony Chavez, Steve Trujillo, Tony Estrada, Barbara Aranda-Naranjo, Yolanda Cantu, Herman Curiel, David Barney, Betty Duran, Saleem, Sudhir

 

 

1.  Project reports:

 

a.  Valley AIDS Council

 

In three months, completed 46 in-takes, 9 clients enrolled in SPNS project (20% are participating in SPNS and 80% are not) – those not participating prefer to see Dr. Garcia versus the clinics.  Coordinating a partnership meeting for June 8, 2001 while OU staff are on site visit.  Project will create a SPNS manual with policies and procedures for use by the project for staff as a reference.  They are planning on publishing a SPNS newsletter with a Who’s Who column that is intend as a motivator for staff.  Also developing a needle exchange protocol.

 

b.  Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe

 

  1. Three nurses are in New Orleans this week at the Delta AIDS Education Training Center for HIV instruction and practicum.
  2. Interviews for Clinical Social Worker (LMSW-ACP) will be held this week.
  3. The dates for the OU evaluation team site visit to La Fe have been set for June 11-12, 2001.
  4. The CDC Project Officer for a grant entitled Innovative HIV Testing in Communities of Color will be in El Paso May 17-18; how this effort will complement SPNS outreach will be explored.
  5. Incentive options have been decided; $10 vouchers for food, gas, and phone will be given out during multiple data collection sessions.
  6. A phone conference call was held with HRSA and OU staff to discuss start of data collection for the project.  Situation concerning the status of modules translated into Spanish was covered.
  7. A budget amendment clarification for RN positions was submitted per request of Project Officer.
  8. Phone conference calls have been held with Peter Martin Associates of Chicago to find ways that FACTORS database can be modified for SPNS record-keeping.
  9. La Fe is in process of working with the Texas Department of Health to schedule a follow-up meeting with Dr. Cravioto of FONSIDA in Mexico; the item of discussion is details of action plan for greater access to medications and case management for transborder clients.
  10. Clinical staff have been asked to prepare case studies that document and describe how border clients experience barriers to entering and remaining in systems of care.

 

Evaluation – several persons trained on data collection.  Will collect data in two ways, local modules and multi-site.  About 80% of their clients are Spanish speakers.  Will begin collecting information for Module A beginning today. 

 

 

c.  Camino de Vida Center for HIV

 

1.         Training of the promotores continues especially with the filling out of the forms.  Careful screening before they turn them in and then a second screening before the data are entered seems to have solved many of the problems.

 

2.         Post-counseling and the completion of Forms A, B and E have increased.  The promotores have taken a hiatus on testing (except for a special few) and are concentrating on getting the results, the post counseling and the forms completed.

 

3.         We have received the incentives for all clients and will distribute them at the time of post-counseling.

 

4.         We met Friday to develop the enhanced HIV education component and the promotores will be counseling our clients who test negative into special on site sessions.

 

5.         More efforts will be given to locating MSM.  Several new contacts will help the promotores identify and recruit this population.

 

d.  Arizona Border HIV/AIDS Care Project

 

AETC has gone to clinic in Yuma to plan training needs.  Four new in-takes.  Meeting with collaborators on May 4th.  $52,000 grant from National Black Caucus to enhance enrollment of persons in ADAP has was offered to their project, but they have not made a final decision.  Have over 1,700 contacts in their data base from outreach.  Plan to implement physicians training evaluation in July.  Steve has been using the Spanish Code Book as guide in filling out the other data modules which have not been translated.

 

e.  San Ysidro Health Center

 

Supporting the County’s efforts with outreach.  Partner meeting is scheduled for today, they meet on a monthly basis.  Working on continuation application.

 

Evaluation Activities:

·         Four staff-specific data collection booster trainings were held on Friday May 4 and Monday May 7th. Based on review of data handed in so far, Alisa addressed specific items on the modules that were causing inconsistent responses. The trainings were also an opportunity to reinforce team spirit and recognize the hard work being carried out by data collection staff.

·         As part of the booster training, Promotoras and other outreach workers were brought together to share outreach experiences and how they established “confianza” with clients in order to ask risk behavior questions.  Some of the promotoras were uncomfortable in asking clients about sensitive issues, and by meeting with other promotoras were able to share their experiences and enhance their confidence to work in outreach.  Developed a brief survey questionnaire that CM and testers will use to record the Client’s status in regards to returning for results and who referred them to testing.

 

·         As of Thursday May 10, 2001

104 individuals have been outreached across the 4 sites.

Module A has been completed for 21 persons.

Module B has been completed for 21 persons.

Module D has been completed for 21 persons.

Web site is established and they will post the link on the bulletin board.

 

2.  Multi-site evaluation issues – David Barney:

 

a.  The Evaluation Center has received University approval to fill one FTE position that is vacant in our grant, hope to fill this position by late May, 2001.  The position is for an Information Technology Analyst I – projects were asked to refer anyone who may be interested in the position to contact Betty within the next two weeks.

 

b.  Survey with yes or no responses, must filled in one of the circles – leaving it blank is regarded as missing data and during analysis the data for that one case will be excluded from the analysis.

 

c.  Spanish Translations – Betty provided history on how the Spanish translation have been handled and approved by all the projects.  Changes to modify questions to local grammar can be done in the Code Book locally which the data collector can substitute when reading questions to a client.  John said Vicki was able to pilot test the demographics module locally without any significant difficulty.  San Diego also expressed they had not difficulty.  New Mexico recommended we move forward with the recommendations from the Translation Committee.  Barbara (HRSA) said we need to be clear in the future about the process of how feedback will be received and how final decisions will be made.  Ledia expressed concern with pilot testing individual modules.  Steve also agreed with Ledia, stating that it becomes frustrating for clients to have return multiple times to test a module.  It was agreed that David would put all the modules into Spanish, then send them to all sites, allow seven days for review and pilot testing and feedback to OU Evaluation Center..  In the event OU does not receive any feedback within the seven days, we will proceed to finalize the modules.  David anticipates it will take him about one week to complete all the remaining modules. 

 

Betty stated that feedback in which three or more identify a problem with a particular word or phrase, will be bought before the grantees for review and decision on how to correct.  Problems identified by a single project – the project will be encourage to insert an alternate choice in the code book for the data persons use.  John suggested that OU compile the comments and e-mail them to all grantees and the translation committee.  David said he would prefer to have the Translation Committee review the comments and make a final recommendation to the group.    

 

3.  Dissemination – Report format for Border Health Conference:

 

            Protocol:          *Herman will moderate the presentation

*Wayne will present for HRSA (Margarita Figueroa Gonzales will present in Wayne’s place)

                                    *David will present Multi-site evaluation plan

                                    *Each site will have 10 minutes to present their local project information

                                    *20 minutes for group discussion

            Recommend that everyone develop a power point presentation which can be downloaded onto the web site both under the individual project information and multi-site dissemination.  David will bring a lap top and LCD projector to conference.

4.  HRSA issues

 

Barbara advise that no extension on grant continuation application deadline.  She advised projects experiencing problems with the time limit may contact their project officer about an extension. 

 

5.  Other: None