Implementation support for HIV and substance use prevention

A team led by Diane Santa Maria, dean of Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston, will develop and assess training tools to support HIV prevention among youth who have experienced sexual assault.

Last year, Santa Maria received a three-year, $672,000 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her study, “Improving HIV Prevention and Substance Use Post-Sexual Assault Services for Adolescents and Young Adults (R34DA063014).” That project focuses on assessing the feasibility of integrating same-day prophylaxis and substance use prevention care into services provided by sexual assault nurse examiners and victim advocates.

“Post-assault care systems are rarely set up to address the intersecting risks of sexual violence, HIV acquisition, and substance use disorders,” said Santa Maria, DrPH, MSN, ACRN, PHNA-BC, FSAHM, FAAN. “We are finding that even well-designed HIV prevention interventions may fail to achieve population-level impacts without sufficient implementation support.”

A $156,000, one-year supplement to the NIDA grant will be used to develop and test a coordinated strategy for integrating services to support prevention of substance use, HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases into sexual assault care at multiple touchpoints. It will include training modules and organizational assessments for hotline staff as well as training, coaching, and implementation tools for nurses and advocates. The team also plans to develop a text-based tool to provide follow up prompts for providers and medication reminders for survivors.

“These supports will be folded into the parent study to address implementation barriers and prepare for larger research trials in the future to test effectiveness,” Santa Maria said.

Serving as co-principal investigator on the R34 study is Leila Wood, PhD, MSSW, director of research and evaluation at the Texas Violence and Injury Prevention Research Center at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. Co-investigators are Khara Breeden, DNP, RN, SANE-A, SANE-P, AFN-BC, CEO of the nonprofit Texas Forensic Nurse Examiners; and Angela Head, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavior Sciences at McGovern Medical School.

Santa Maria serves on the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at NIH, the Science Advisory Council of the American Academy of Nursing, the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine Board of Directors, and as director of the Developmental Core of the Texas Center for AIDS Research. She is the Jane and Robert Cizik Distinguished Chair and the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair in Nursing Education Leadership.