2020 Texas HIV/STD Conference – About the Conference
About the Conference
The Texas HIV/STD Conference aimed to educate and inform HIV/STD health professionals who serve Texans living with and affected by HIV and other STDs. The conference drew more than 1,000 HIV/STD health professionals from across Texas.
Priority Topics
- National and State Ending the HIV Epidemic Initiatives
- Treatment as Prevention (TasP)
- Effective Messaging to Reduce Stigma
- Test and Treat
- Status Neutral Prevention and Treatment Cycle
- Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP)
- Ending STDs and Viral Hepatitis in Texas
- Health Equity/Community Mobilization
- Focus on Affected Communities
- Sexual Health
- Trauma-Informed Care
- STD Prevention and Clinical Care
- Hepatitis C Prevention, Testing and Treatment
Individual Track Priorities
HIV Care Services Track
Purpose: Ensure that all people living with HIV in Texas are engaged in the system of care and achieve sustained viral suppression.
Priorities:
- Develop strategies for successful communication to enhance the patient-provider experience.
- Increase communication and collaboration between traditional and non-traditional providers.
- Understand, identify, and address stigma and barriers to accessing HIV services.
- Increase focus and training on retention in care.
- Identify approaches and innovations to help locate individuals living with HIV who know their status but are not in medical care and link them to medical care.
- Identify strategies that will assist with retaining priority populations in medical care.
- Implement technology to enhance and facilitate linkage and retention into medical care.
Prevention Track
Purpose: Increasing equitable access to prevention resources.
Priorities:
- Increase and diversify the use of technologies such as social media, mobile apps, and other platforms to address barriers for our priority populations.
- Identifying best practices to implement a status neutral approach to increase access to prevention and support services. Improve linkages to HIV related medical care through the development of new processes and community partnerships.
Epidemiology and Surveillance Track
Purpose: Increase knowledge and understanding of population-level, epidemiological HIV/STD/HCV data.
Priorities:
- Explore factors and barriers that play a role in creating health disparities among people living with HIV, STDs, or Hepatitis C.
- Share the current prevalence and trends of HIV/STD/HCV in Texas.
- To increase data literacy among public health professionals and community partners.
- Focus on which behavioral and network characteristics play a role in the acquisition and successful treatment of HIV, STDs, or Hepatitis C.
- Understand how data informs planning and decision making at the local level.
STD Track
Purpose: Increase knowledge of STD clinical care and prevention of STDs.
Priorities:
- Increase knowledge about intimate partner violence and human trafficking and how they influence STD transmission.
- Improve sexual health prevention practices through telemedicine and other technologies such as home collection tests, social media, mobile apps and other tools for improving program efficiencies.
Viral Hepatitis Track
Purpose: Increase awareness of Hepatitis C in Texas and build tools and strategies for enhancing Hepatitis C prevention and treatment in Texas.
Priorities:
- Increase knowledge of effective Hepatitis C prevention, testing and treatment programming.
- Understand the challenges and opportunities in Hepatitis C treatment.
- Understand the link between new Hepatitis C infections, the opioid epidemic and substance use disorder.
- Identify barriers and stigma related to Hepatitis C testing and treatment.
Health Equity Track
Purpose: Achieve equitable health outcomes in relation to HIV/STD/HCV prevention and care for all Texans.
Priorities:
- Identify the causes of HIV/STD/HCV health inequities among priority populations.
- Work with communities to develop culturally appropriate care that identifies and removes barriers.
- Understand the historical context of why health inequities exist, the impact of health inequities and how knowledge of health inequities can be used to improve health outcomes.
- Identify and discuss life course theory and tie social theory to existing best practices.
Leadership Track
Purpose: Define the role of Leadership in Ending the Epidemic.
Priorities:
- Identify strategies that build stronger and more diverse leadership within HIV/STD organizations and Texas communities by embracing cultural, racial, and sexual identities.
- Identify strategies to make working in Public Health more appealing.
- Identify strategies to recruit and retain a skilled workforce that is shrinking due to retirement, fatigue, limited resources (low pay, limited training, etc.).
Health Communication Track
Purpose: To promote health equity through evidence-based health communication and marketing.
Priorities:
- Share strategies to improve communication and engagement with priority populations affected by HIV and STDs in Texas.
- Improve the rate of return on health communication investments by exploring new or novel technologies and strategies.
- Build the capacity of HIV/STD programs to leverage digital media.
- Identify best practices in health communication and marketing and explain how these practices can be implemented at the program level.
- Explain methods of evaluating the effectiveness of health communication and marketing strategies.
