Abstract
This paper is the third and final of a series that has previously presented the rationale (Rier and Indyk, this volume) and major program elements (Indyk and Rier, this volume) of an approach to link community and tertiary sociomedical providers, clients/patients, sites, and systems into an integrated response to HIV/AIDS. The primary goal has been to improve sociomedical HIV/AIDS services for a hard-to-reach inner city population. The current paper first summarizes the main advantages (e.g., greater efficiency; more realistic, effective programs with greater credibility among the community; stimulation of knowledge production and dissemination amongst players rarely formally engaged in such activities; creation of a platform useful for other applications) of this work. It then examines some of the main organizational challenges in conducting the work (involving issues such as personnel, coordination, funding, turf conflicts, sustainability). From this discussion emerge organizational requisites to conducting this work (e.g., development of key boundary-spanning figures; attention to the specific interests of potential linkage partners; translation efforts to demonstrate the value of participation; a continuous quality improvement approach featuring wide distribution of feedback in user-friendly form; flexibility, tact and patience), so that others can adapt and apply the linkage approach to manage HIV/AIDS or other problems. Finally, we explain how theory and practice have driven one another in this work.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 93-110 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Social Work in Health Care |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue number | 3-4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 25 Apr 2006 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The overall project began with a $600,000 grant from the Aaron Diamond Foundation to the first author. Covering the years 1990-94, these funds helped launch the initial work around infrastructure-building and community-based resource, program and data development, and evaluation. However, this was virtually the only funding given in direct support of the overall linkage work. Lacking a stable source of additional “dedicated” money, the continued sustenance and extension of this work has been forced to rely on a series of discrete grants that usually committed us to deliver specific services (e.g., to design and provide HIV training to a given number of health professionals at a given site). However, such funding did not allow for the fact that our ability to pro-
Funding
The overall project began with a $600,000 grant from the Aaron Diamond Foundation to the first author. Covering the years 1990-94, these funds helped launch the initial work around infrastructure-building and community-based resource, program and data development, and evaluation. However, this was virtually the only funding given in direct support of the overall linkage work. Lacking a stable source of additional “dedicated” money, the continued sustenance and extension of this work has been forced to rely on a series of discrete grants that usually committed us to deliver specific services (e.g., to design and provide HIV training to a given number of health professionals at a given site). However, such funding did not allow for the fact that our ability to pro-
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Aaron Diamond Foundation |
Keywords
- AIDS services
- Inter-organizational linkages
- Knowledge production and dissemination
- Sustainability
