HAITI AIDS RESEARCH TRAINING: MODELS TO IMPLEMENTATION

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of GHESKIO-Cornell ICOHRTA training program is to increase capacity in integrated clinical, operational, and health services research in support of Haiti's national scale-up of HIV prevention and care services. Haiti is the poorest country and has the highest rates of HIV infection in the Western Hemisphere, with an estimated 5% of the adult population infected. In response, the Haitian Ministry of Health is initiating the Haitian National HIV Care and Prevention Network, a collaboration of public and private health care organizations across the country that will provide a standardized package of HIV care and prevention services to 300,000 people/year, including voluntary counseling and testing, management of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections, prevention of mother to child HIV transmission and comprehensive HIV care. The Ministry has asked the GHESKIO Centers to lead this network through training, supervision, monitoring and evaluation, and through the conduct of operational and health services research. The GHESKIO Centers is an international research and training institution that has benefited from twenty years of research capacity building from Cornell and Vanderbilt Universities, supported by the Fogarty International Center. GHESKIO is now recognized as an international center of research excellence, and is a member of the NIH HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), and a field site of the WHO's Tropical Disease Research Programme (TDR). In the current proposal, GHESKIO will become the primary training institution and extend research capacity to other organizations in Haiti that are participating in the Haitian National HIV Care and Prevention Network. GHESKIO, in collaboration with Haitian and International partners, will develop short- and long-term training curricula in clinical, operational, and health services research methodology and in ethics, program management, and scientific writing. A Masters in Public Health Program offered in Haiti will be the culmination of this curricula development. The objective is to train a cadre of research leaders and to increase research capacity in the National HIV Care and Prevention Network. The specific areas of integrated clinical, operational, and health services research that will form the basis of the proposed ICOHRTA training program include: 1) adult antiretroviral treatment; 2) prevention of mother to child HIV transmission and antiretroviral treatment of HIV-infected mothers and infants; 3) tuberculosis; 4) sexually transmitted infections; 5) ethics; and 6) health outcomes of HIV care and prevention. Research training will focus on translating models of HIV care and prevention to large scale national implementation.