No Images? Click here Connecting with our network coast to coastREACH 2.0 News & Events, July 2017 The CBR Collaborative Centre 2.0 and our Community-Based Research PrinciplesWe are so pleased to announce that our team was successful in our proposal to CIHR under the Collaborative Centres of HIV/AIDS Community-Based Research competition. This news means that the CIHR CBR Collaborative: A Program of REACH (CBR Collaborative 2.0) will continue and that there will be sustained regional and national support through the CBR Collaborative 2.0 to foster rigorous, relevant community-based research (CBR) to improve the health and wellbeing of people living with and affected by HIV in Canada. When we were preparing our proposal our team had time to reflect on the community-based research principles that we use to guide our work. As part of our continued practice in CBR, the CBR Collaborative 2.0 and REACH 2.0 staff team is taking time to reflect and write about each of these principles. PLPH Shares Findings on Housing ServicesDarren Lauscher, a PLPH community consultant who has been involved with the study since its early days, presented a poster titled “A Critical Examination of Housing Services for People Living with HIV and Recommendations for Action.” This poster focused on study participants’ access and use of housing programs and services in the three PLPH research sites (Greater Vancouver, Kamloops, and Prince George). It also listed the recommendations that PLPH community partners suggested in response to issues that participants identified with some of these services, the foremost being confusion and frustration with navigating the subsidized and rental markets. Public Health 2017 Conference in HalifaxAt the recent Public Health 2017 conference held in Halifax, Nova Scotia REACH, Dalhousie University, CATIE, and NCCID collaborated to host a preconference session on June 5th 2017, called Setting the Stage to Advance Sexual Health Promotion in Canada. On Wednesday June 9th, 2017 REACH also supported a symposium, chaired by Dr. Jacqueline Gahagan, on the HIV and STBBI landscape in Canada. The speakers discussed their work in developing and implementing different self-directed approaches to HIV testing in an effort to breakdown barriers and increase uptake Saskatchewan's First HIV Testing DayOn June 27th, Saskatchewan held it's first provincial HIV Testing Day. Events were organized across cities and communities, as far north as Pelican Narrows, as far east as Kamsack, as far west as Meadow Lake and as far south as Regina! A list of where testing events were held can be found on the SK HIV Collaborative's website here. The origin of this provincial testing day is a great example of how community-driven initiatives can lead to widely-adopted health promotion strategies. In the summer of 2016, the Saskatoon Indian and Metis Friendship Centre (SIMFC) coordinated a city-wide HIV testing day (also on June 27). Leveraging partnerships with AIDS Saskatoon, PLWA Network, Saskatoon Tribal Council and the Saskatoon Health Region, this SIMFC-led coalition organized a full day testing fair. The Tidal Wave of our Overdose CrisisClose to 100 representatives of community agencies, government, health professionals, police, and people with lived experience gathered for a very successful day-long workshop to learn and talk about opportunities to work together in the face of the overdose crisis. “The Tidal wave of our Overdose Crisis” was held June 8th at the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre in North End Halifax. It was hosted by Direction 180 and Mainline Needle Exchange, two community agencies at the forefront of harm reduction efforts in Halifax and beyond. Members of the Atlantic Interdisciplinary Research Network on Social and Behavioural Issues in Hepatitis C and HIV (AIRN) were pleased to be involved on the planning team and at the event. Data Parties: Bringing Information to Communities in CBRYou don’t often think of the words “data” and “party” in the same context, but at the Pacific AIDS Network (PAN) we’re actively pursuing ways to make research exciting and relevant. To that end, we’ve now held two data parties for our community-based research study, Positive Living Positive Homes (PLPH). A “data party” is simply a gathering of people who are interested or who have a stake in a particular study. The goal is to make sense of research data in a collaborative way. Because PLPH is a community-based study, the idea of a data party was attractive because it would enable our team to bring together varied viewpoints from our community stakeholders. Concevoir une intervention avec, par et pour les femmes vivant avec le VIH et victimes de violence conjugaleLa littérature scientifique a démontré des liens entre le VIH et les violences exercées envers les femmes. Les femmes victimes de violence conjugale (VC) sont plus à risque de contracter une ITSS, dont le VIH. Elles ont notamment plus de difficulté à négocier le condom. De plus, une importante proportion de femmes vivant avec le VIH subissent davantage de violence au sein de leur relation intime. De ce fait, existe-t-il, au Québec, des services offerts aux femmes faisant l’intersection entre le VIH et la violence ? Une recherche communautaire dirigée par la chercheure en sexologie Mylène Fernet (UQAM) a permis de constater que les organismes de lutte contre le VIH ne traitent pas suffisamment des problématiques liées aux VC. |