Berkeley Social Welfare, in partnership with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Planned Parenthood of Northern California, has received a planning grant from Gilead Sciences totaling nearly $150,000 to develop a sexual health assessment tool for determining patients' HIV risk and counseling needs for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), which helps prevent HIV through medication.
"Increasing Access to Effective HIV Prevention Resources Using Design Thinking and Patient Engagement" — through data collection on patient and provider needs as well as relationship cultivation with service providers, particularly those who serve Latinos and men who have sex with men (MSM) — aims to develop a tool that can be used by healthcare providers for a number of patient populations, including MSM, heterosexual women and men and transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.
Additional project activities will include establishing partnerships with other organizations, particularly those serving MSM and Latinos, to both develop and pilot the tool; collaboration with a Planned Parenthood affiliate in southeast US, where HIV rates are highest, also for tool development and testing; as well as the creation of a community advisory board for input on all stages of research and tool development.
Berkeley Social Welfare Assistant Professor Anu Manchikanti Gomez will serve as the principal investigator, with Professor Kurt Organista and School of Public Health Clinical Professor of Community Health Sciences Linda Neuhauser serving as co-investigators.