AIDS org. gets grant to study disparities in healthcare for gay men of color

Cambridge Cares About AIDS has been awarded a $70,000 grant by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation to help the organization address the disparities in health care for HIV positive gay men of color.

The award is part of a lump sum of $768,387 given to 11 community health organizations across Massachusetts to help address health care disparities based on race, ethnicity, immigration status, age, mental illness and sexual orientation.

"We received a lot of powerful and incredible proposals and had a difficult process," said Miriam Messinger, associate director of grantmaking and evaluation at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation. "I would say that it is clear that HIV/AIDS continues to be a critical area ... for black and Latino men."

The grant represents the first phase of an intended three-year award schedule as part of the Closing the Gap on Health Care Disparities program. The first phase will allow for Cambridge Cares to spend an entire year researching and planning.

"The first year of the grant is Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Massachusetts specifically funding us to do a year long planning process for community assessment," explained Lee Thornhill, director of prevention education at Cambridge Cares about AIDS. "Which is great because were able to do a really in depth needs assessment. So we have this year to plan and then to develop the intervention."

According to Thornhill, there are two main issues surrounding black gay men with HIV/AIDS in Massachusetts. According to statistics, black men are significantly more likely to enter medical care in advanced stages of the disease. This late entry into health care is one of the contributing factors of the death rate of black men with HIV/AIDS being five times higher than the average rate.

"We want to understand the role stigma is playing in preventing black men from both disclosing injection drug use and or same sex behaviors," explained Thornhill.

"So anecdotally what we know in terms of our work within Cambridge Cares is that there may be more men who are injecting drugs and who are non-gay identified who aren't accessing our prevention services but instead, prevention services across the board. We want to use that information to strengthen our ability to develop HIV programs specifically with men who have sex with men (MSM) and injection drug users."

Chosen from 75 inquiry letters and 20 proposals, Cambridge Cares will spend the next three years focusing on a community-based participatory research project, creating a strategic plan and developing the infrastructure and design of an evidence-based, community-level intervention to reduce the number of individuals who delay accessing care. These are the type of goals that fit perfectly into the mission of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, said Messinger, who noted that when thinking about healthcare disparities, the foundation aims to take into consideration how non-healthcare issues impact health.

"Some of the things we saw within Cambridge Cares is a willingness to have members of the black community, who have been infected and affected accessing the medical system later, as part of the advisory committee so that they have a mechanism to reach out to other MSM."