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This three-year capacity building project targets labor and delivery departments in 120 California hospitals to implement HIV rapid testing with women presenting in labor with no previous documented HIV test or prenatal care. These women may be the hardest-to-reach populations who prefer to avoid contact with the health care system, such as migrant women, undocumented women, drug-addicted women, women who engage in sex work, and women with a child protective services history. Project components include:

• Curriculum development to train labor and delivery staff
• Development of materials (such as sample policies, procedures, patient education materials, consent forms, etc.) to support implementation of rapid testing
• Staff training
• On-going technical assistance to ensure policies are followed and antiretroviral prophylaxis medications are readily available when needed

The project uses a decentralized model, with implementation activities based at PAETC’s 11 local performance sites in California with oversight and management from PAETC’s Central Office at UCSF. This project is supported by a contract with the California State Office of AIDS, with CDC funds.

The Transitions Project provides capacity building assistance (CBA) and technical assistance to community-based organizations (CBOs) and health departments throughout the US to promote knowledgeable, sensitive, and effective HIV/AIDS prevention for transgender communities of color and HIV+ transgender people. The project particularly focuses on young transgender women of color. The goals of the Transitions Project are:

• To improve healthcare providers’ awareness around issues that impact trans health and access to healthcare.
• To expand the capacities of HIV/AIDS prevention organizations in order to serve trans clients more effectively.
• To increase transgender-specific resources in community-based health promotion programs.
• To promote community building and networking among trans and gender-variant persons and allied service providers and advocates.
• To help adapt evidence-based interventions that were originally developed for other populations so that they are culturally appropriate and relevant to young trans women of color.

The Transitions Team is available for consultation, training, capacity-building and technical assistance throughout the United States.

The Cochrane Collaborative Review Group on HIV Infection and AIDS (Cochrane HIV/AIDS Group) is one of 52 Collaborative Review Groups of the Cochrane Collaboration. The Cochrane HIV/AIDS Group, with editorial bases at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the South African Medical Research Council (MRC), Cape Town, South Africa, brings together individuals from around the world who share an interest in preparing, disseminating, and updating systematic reviews of rigorous HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, palliative care and pain management research as well as enhancing the science of evidence-based health care. As of this writing in February 2009, we have 53 completed systematic reviews and 50 reviews in progress in all areas of HIV prevention, treatment, palliative care, and health care services. About 30 of the reviews in progress are at advanced stages of completion. We work very closely with our satellite editorial base at the South Africa Cochrane Centre, and have developed a mentoring program with them to assist new authors in sub-Saharan Africa. This helps African researchers to learn the process of conducting a systematic review, and helps us to be sure that the reviews we are conducting are relevant to the areas of the world most impacted by the AIDS pandemic. We have also helped to re-establish the Cochrane Sexually Transmitted Diseases Group in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with Dr. Mauro Ramos of the Centro por Estudos de AIDS/DST do Rio Grande do Sul (CEARGS). We work with policy makers at the national and international levels to disseminate the results of our reviews, and have produced documents used by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute of Medicine, South Africa’s Treatment Action Coalition, South Africa’s MRC (at a national level), the US State Department, the World Health Organization, and various other national and international non-governmental organizations

In collaboration with the Caribbean HIV/AIDS Alliance and Intrahealth, CAPS is working in four Eastern Caribbean countries to enhance the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The USAID-funded Eastern Caribbean Community Action Project (EC-CAP) supports prevention, development and use of strategic information, roll-out of community-based counseling and testing, and provision of care services (palliative and home based care). As one of three partners, the CAPS team’s specific aims are:

1. To identify the barriers and facilitators to access and delivery of HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services (Antigua-Barbuda, Barbados, St. Vincent-Grenadines)
2. To assess the feasibility and acceptability of prevention interventions for different population groups at risk for HIV (St Kitts-Nevis, Barbados)
3. To provide technical support and capacity building to improve regional, country and programmatic monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems for assessing the quality and impact of HIV services (all countries)

CAPS is providing specific expertise and technical support to design a series of special studies to:

• Describe HIV risk and health seeking behavior
• Conduct studies on implementation and scale-up community-based HIV counseling and testing
• Train local prevention providers on monitoring and evaluation systems, data use and program planning
• Provide local organizations with technical assistance in strategic information, package findings and recommendations of the evaluations into best practice publications
• Disseminate the publications at the international, regional, and national level