The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded supplement project “Improving HIV Prevention and Care for Transgender Latinas in Oakland, CA” is a part of the FY21 round of funded projects in the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. (EHE) initiative. This initiative aims to end the HIV epidemic in the United States by 2030. (For an introduction or refresher on the EHE initiative, read an overview on HIV.gov HERE)
Improving HIV Prevention and Care for Transgender Latinas in Oakland, CA is a community engaged research project that was designed to address health inequities among trans Latinas in the East Bay, particularly in Alameda County. The county is part of the EHE initiative’s 57 priority jurisdictions included in phase I of the plan that were chosen due to the substantial diagnoses of HIV. According to Greg Rebchook, the project’s principal academic investigator, the project comes from a need to close an artificial divide within the community.
“There is encouraging evidence from other programs, such as the Triumph (Triunfo) project, where participants were using PrEP more effectively after being involved in the project,” said Rebchook, Principal Investigator for the project and Professor at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). “However, one of the things we noticed in some of these interventions within the trans community, not only in Oakland, is that having status-specific programs may be contributing to HIV stigma in the community. We wanted to adapt a project that would be status neutral, serving both trans women living with HIV and HIV negative trans women.”
Aside from wanting to redesign the intervention, the EHE funded project aims to address the intersectional barriers that the trans community faces in terms of accessing prevention and treatment. UCSF and La Clinica, the project’s community partner, aimed to increase their understanding of the social and structural determinants that affect trans Latinas’ experience with HIV testing, PrEP and treatment.
“Our community partner, La Clinica, is a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Alameda County that primarily serves the Latinx community,” said Rebchook. “The clinic has a very active trans health program that provides gender affirming care to clients and consists of a relatively large trans patient population. We collaborated with La Clinica to decide how to enhance the intervention (the Triumph (Triunfo) project) to be status neutral and reach those intersectional barriers.”
The project conducted 25 semi-structured interviews, both in English and Spanish, with trans Latinas in Alameda County and have analyzed the data to point out the intersectional barriers that they were facing. Although the Improving HIV Prevention and Care for Transgender Latinas in Oakland, CA project was a 1-year funded project, they received an additional grant from Gilead Sciences that is continuing the work of studying the implementation of the intervention.
Acknowledgements
Tara Gonzalez, MD: Community Principal Investigator
Carmen Foster: Clinic Manager
Lorena Martinez Hernandez: Lead Health Navigator
Octavio Pulido Carillo: Clinic Supervisor
Sophia Zamudio-Haas, PhD, MPH: UCSF Assistant Professor
Luz Venegas, UCSF Data Analyst and Research Coordinator
Susan Kegeles, MPH: UCSF Professor Emeritus
Deepalika Chakravarty, MS: UCSF Data Analyst