How can healthcare professionals help patients in health clinic waiting rooms learn how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and HIV? Show them a soap opera.
That's what Kevin Malotte, Archstone Endowed Chair and director of the CSULB Center for Health Care Innovation, discovered when he led an evaluation study of Safe in the City, an HIV/AIDS intervention program that proved so successful that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) included it in The 2008 Compendium of Evidence-based HIV Prevention Interventions.
Safe in the City focuses on educating diverse audiences by showing a 23-minute STD/HIV prevention video in STD clinic waiting rooms. A soap opera-style format attracts viewers' attention to the video that contains key prevention messages aimed at helping the audience understand STD/HIV risk, promoting condom use and encouraging patients and their partners to seek treatment.
"We're very excited that the Safe in the City project was included in this issue of the Compendium," said Malotte. "Interventions listed in this publication are the ones the CDC will support when they provide funding to local health departments, community-based organizations and other non-profit groups. Already, Safe in the City has been requested by more than 1,200 sites to be used in their waiting rooms, so it is probably the most widely distributed of the eight evidence-based interventions that were added to the Compendium this year.
"During our evaluation study, the Safe in the City intervention did demonstrate about a nine percent reduction in new infections, and that is a significant amount since this is a relatively easily implemented intervention," Malotte pointed out. "This program has the potential to do a lot of good in communities across the United States."
Across town, the Center for Behavioral Research and Services (CBRS) has been conducting social and behavioral research on health and substance-use related issues since the early 1980s, the last 12 years from an office on Atlantic Avenue in Long Beach. The studies have focused on HIV risk, sexually transmitted diseases, and understanding tobacco use among young people. CBRS also operates programs to reduce HIV risk in historically under-served populations.
"We are basically the center in the community for the university so we've been known for providing behavioral, social and health services," said Dennis Fisher, a psychology professor at CSULB and director of CBRS. "Orginally it was the Center for Behavioral Research and that came out of the AIDS research project in the 1980s and then it combined with the Long Beach AIDS Network and it became the Center for Behavioral Research and Services."
CBRS conducts most of its activities in the Long Beach and South Bay areas, although it has participated in or conducted national and international programs. Its community facility serves as the administrative office, the base for outreach activities and a food bank, and a location for prevention counseling. CBRS also operates a mobile unit that brings HIV testing and counseling and immune assessment services to drug users both in and out of treatment, visiting drug treatment programs and neighborhoods with a high prevalence of drug abuse.
"We have records showing nearly 5,000 individuals in our database," Fisher said, "but that's only those who have come in for some kind of counseling and/or testing and doesn't include people who are in need of food only."
