The Midwest Center for AIDS Education and Training at the University of Illinois at Chicago will expand its services nationwide with the help of a new $3 million grant.
Founded in 1988 to provide HIV/AIDS education to medical students and primary care physicians, the center is already working to bring the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration's National HIV Curriculum to students and health professionals in 10 Midwestern states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
MATEC will build on lessons learned from a previous project conducted over the past four years when we partnered with 16 academic institutions with accredited medical, nursing and pharmacy programs in the Midwest. With this project, we successfully integrated content from the National HIV Curriculum's e-learning platform into their existing curricula. In doing so, we strongly believe that we have improved the quality of HIV education and training in these institutions.”
Dr. Ricardo Rivero, executive director of MATEC and co-principal investigator for the grant
MATEC, which is based in UIC's Department of Community and Family Medicine in the College of Medicine, will use these new funds to introduce the curriculum at academic institutions in the 57 non-Midwest jurisdictions designated as “high priority” by the federal initiative of the government to end the HIV epidemic in the US.
In addition to continuing its work with graduate schools in medicine, nursing and pharmacy, MATEC will use the new funds to target physician residency programs for dentists and family medicine practitioners.
“The National HIV Curriculum has a tremendous impact on our students' ability to provide knowledgeable and compassionate care to people living with HIV,” said Natacha Pierre, UIC clinical assistant professor of population health nursing in the College of Nursing and co-investigator. the grant. “Increasing the number and quality of health care providers is essential to increasing access to care and ending the HIV epidemic. national. We are ready for the challenge.”
According to Corina Wagner, MATEC's research and evaluation manager and co-principal investigator for the new grant, “The project will help existing faculty, especially those who are not HIV specialists and who may not have the clinical background to HIV, with knowledge of HIV content. teaching methods and ways of dealing with potential students' reluctance to engage with vulnerable communities, such as those most affected by HIV'.
Rivero said, “In doing so, the project will continue to address student and resident behavioral barriers to caring for people living with or at risk of acquiring HIV, and we expect that those trained in HIV care through the integrated National HIV curriculum will be able to correctly identify, address or refer their patients with HIV-related needs, particularly for chronic disease interventions that are emerging as an increasing number of people living with HIV age.”
Other key faculty and co-investigators on the new grant include Dr. Mahesh Patel, assistant professor in the College of Medicine. Blake Max, clinical associate professor in the College of Pharmacy. and Dr. Sarah Henkle, assistant clinical professor of family medicine in the College of Medicine.
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