$3 million grant to support the expansion of UIC's Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center

$3 million grant to support the expansion of UIC's Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center

The Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center at the University of Illinois Chicago will expand its services nationwide with the help of a new $3 million grant.

The center, founded in 1988 to provide HIV/AIDS training for medical students and primary care physicians, is already working to make the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration's national HIV curriculum available to medical students and professionals in 10 Midwestern states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and Wisconsin.

MATEC builds on lessons learned from a previous project conducted over the past four years, when we worked with 16 academic institutions with accredited medical, nursing and pharmacy programs in the Midwest. With this project, we have successfully integrated content from the National HIV Curriculum e-learning platform into their existing curricula. We firmly believe that by doing this we have improved the quality of HIV education and training in these facilities.”

Dr. Ricardo Rivero, Executive Director and Co-Principal Investigator of MATEC, regarding the grant

MATEC, located in the UIC 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 jurisdictions outside the Midwest that have been designated a "high priority" by the federal government's initiative to end the HIV epidemic in the United States.

In addition to continuing its work with graduate schools in medicine, nursing and pharmacy, MATEC will use the new funding to offer targeted residency programs for dentists and family physicians.

“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 assistant professor of population health nursing sciences in the College of Nursing and co-investigator on the grant. "Increasing the number and quality of health care providers is essential to improving access to health care and ending the HIV epidemic. If we want to achieve the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' goal of ending the HIV epidemic by 2030, we must go national. We are rising to the challenge."

According to Corina Wagner, MATEC research and evaluation manager and co-project leader of the new grant, "The project will support existing faculty, particularly those who are not HIV specialists and who may lack HIV clinical background, with knowledge of HIV content, teaching methods, and ways to address potential students' reluctance to engage with vulnerable communities, such as those most affected by HIV."

Rivero said: “In this way, the project will continue to address the attitudinal barriers faced by students and residents in caring for people living with HIV or at risk of becoming infected, and we expect that those trained in HIV care through the integrated National HIV Curriculum will be able to identify, address or properly refer their patients with HIV-related needs, particularly for chronic disease interventions that are occurring in a growing number of people living with HIV.

Other key faculty and co-researchers on the new fellowship 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 professor of clinical family medicine in the College of Medicine.

Source:

University of Illinois, Chicago

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