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Health Training...

Center for Health Training (CHT) and its staff are dedicated to improving the abilities of organizations to deliver accessible, high quality, culturally proficient and compassionate services to their clients. We are a mission-driven and principled team of committed staff who strive to deliver culturally appropriate training and technical assistance, research and program evaluation, conference management, and capacity building services to all.

 

Issue #1
Winter 2010

In this issue:

• Lotus HIV+ Women Peer Advocates: Training of Trainers
• Support for Mothers: Inmate Parenting Education
• Focus on Men: The Male Family Planning Research Project
• Featured Resources

 

Lotus HIV+women Peer Advocates: Training of Trainers

The Lotus Project, a collaboration between The Center for Health Training (CHT) and Women Organized to Respond to Life Threatening Disease (WORLD) is a national Peer Advocacy Training & Capacity Building Program targeting women living with HIV funded by Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA). Over the past four year, 183 women across the country have been trained in the women-centered Lotus peer education curriculum to become peer advocates. In September 2009 the Lotus Project hosted its first Training of Trainers (TOT) event to prepare organizations serving HIV positive women to replicate the Lotus peer advocacy curriculum.

Eight organizations from five states across the country participated in the TOT. Participants learned about the logistics of planning and implementing a training for women living with HIV including challenges such as transportation, childcare, special diet, and funding. Participants also developed action plans for recruiting and interviewing potential trainees for local Lotus events, identification of community partners and selection of modules for the training agenda. Each participant had the opportunity to demonstrate one activity of the Lotus Curriculum and received constructive feedback from their peers. Thoughts from those who participated:

“Really like how we got the opportunity to respond to/deal with challenging participants and their questions.  Made it real and I feel slightly better prepared.”

“It was a WONDERFUL training. I learned a lots of new skills and strengths which I will incorporate into our next Lotus training.”

“No one understands the reality of HIV better than someone who lives with it every day. Peers - specially trained members of the community who are living with HIV/AIDS - have the power to serve as an important role model to others who are learning to cope with the daily challenges of living with HIV”

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Support for Mothers: Inmate Parenting Education

Generous funding from the Frees Foundation and the Simmons Foundation, both in Houston, Texas, will ensure that female inmates of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) will have an opportunity to explore and improve their parenting skills.

Most female inmates are mothers. The chances of the child of an inmate parent going to prison as an adult are excellent. Teaching female inmates parenting skills is one way to break this cycle that is costly in both dollars and human capital. TDCJ's existing peer education program provides a built-in, systematic and sustainable venue for increasing parenting skills among hundreds of female inmates.

CHT Resource Group will create a 3-5 hour training module to educate female prison inmates about: childhood development, family systems, effective communication skills and re-unification with children (to be taught as a pre-release class). Through peer education the women will have opportunities to share with one another, and support each other. We know from our experiences with the other peer education programs, that the peer educators continue to function as teachers, mentors and coaches in literally thousands of contacts outside of the classes.

Visit our Products page to see other resources for inmate peer education:
Woman to Woman: Inside and Out... A Women's Health Training Manual for Peer Health Educators

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Focus on Men: The Male Family Planning Research Project

The Male Family Planning Research Project is a partnership between the DHHS/Office of Population Affairs, CHT and five grantee agencies across the United States. The primary purpose of the male research cooperative agreement is to study the effectiveness of a comprehensive service delivery model aimed at increasing the number of males who access family planning and related preventive health services in clinics.

The project is starting its second year.  During year one CHT:

• Developed study protocols and research/assessment tools
• Assessed local grantee needs concerning male services-based on input from clients, staff, and community partners
• Generated study site-specific operational work plans that detail clinic and outreach/inreach efforts to promote RH services for men
• Provided specialized training to clinic staff regarding the culture of men, counseling males in reproductive health, conducting male clinical exams, and promoting the need for RH services for men to existing clients
• Established a cohesive and involved partnership among all project members

CHT's David Fine, Ph.D. is leading the research charge in preparing study sites to move into the project's implementation phase, using their work plans as a guide in making the structural and programmatic changes essential to increasing RH services for men.

To learn more about this project:

www.centerforhealthtraining.org/projects/pr_maleFPR.cfm

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Featured Resources

Sexual History-taking Toolkit: Focus on Chlamydia, Gonorrhea and HIV in the Family Planning Clinic

Visit our Online Trainings section to download this free resource.

This toolkit, designed for clinicians, nurses, medical assistants and other clinic staff that conduct sexual histories and risk assessments with family planning clients, was developed as a collaboration between CHT, CA STD/HIV Prevention Training Center and CA Family Health Council.

The Toolkit includes:

• Information about how to integrate sexual history-taking into client care;
• Comfort Scale: a personal comfort self-assessment exercise for staff;
• The current national recommendations for chlamydia, gonorrhea and HIV screening;
• Samples of self-administered history forms that contain essential sexual history questions for females and males;
• Questions to Ask: a pocket guide with the most important, basic questions to ask in a STI-focused sexual history;
• A demonstration video that presents four dramatizations of sexual history-taking interviews; each scenario is analyzed by experts from the field to give concrete examples of “do's and don'ts”, with recommendations for testing provided at the end of each scenario

 

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