The Engagement Challenge: Step-Up and Lead.
President Obama’s July 2013 Executive Order creating the HIV Care Continuum Initiative called upon federal agencies and other HIV community stakeholders to sharpen their focus on better addressing the drop-offs along the continuum of HIV care as they continue to work to achieve the goals of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
Among Monday’s conference highlights was a plenary session that focused on the challenge of improving engagement in HIV care in order to better address those drop-offs. The lively session was led by Mr. Phill Wilson, President and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute Exit Disclaimer, and featured four young leaders who shared how they are stepping up to respond to the President’s call, each inviting the conference participants to join them.
Framing the session, Mr. Wilson observed, “We now have the tools to end the AIDS epidemic— better diagnostic tools, better surveillance tools, better prevention tools, and now with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, better healthcare financing tools.” The next step, he asserted, is to enlist still more voices to develop, discuss, and deploy new ways to engage—individually, organizationally, at the community level, and as a society—in the national effort to make the dream of the end of HIV a reality. Mr. Wilson then introduced the conference participants to four such fresh voices:
Dr. Leo Moore, an alum of Morehouse School of Medicine who is completing his residency at Yale New Haven Hospital, shared some lessons he learned through the difficult experience of having a close friend receive a positive HIV diagnosis. Among those was that we should make no assumptions about what our friends, family, and others know about HIV and that we need to have explicit conversations with them.
