Authors

  1. Kwong, Jeffrey DNP, MPH, ANP-BC, ACRN, FAANP

Article Content

In my role as a clinical educator and academic leader, I am challenged to ensure that graduates of the program that I oversee are prepared to meet the demands of today's complex health system. Graduates of health professional programs from all disciplines must be prepared to work in an imperfect system-one that includes a growing number of higher acuity patients, fewer resources, demands from administrators to increase productivity, increased obstacles instituted by insurance payors, and a dwindling supply of financial support from funding sources. As a result of these external and systems-level challenges, the amount of knowledge that a new graduate health provider must know is overwhelming. How does a system help ease the burden on health professional trainees? Often the solution that students and educators use is triaging information into one of the three categories: (a) need to know, (b) nice to know, and (c) learn it later. Unfortunately, in many training programs, information about HIV typically falls into one of the latter two categories.

 

The amount of HIV information provided within many undergraduate and graduate programs is either cursory or nonexistent. As a consequence, new providers may be unaware of how to identify, screen, or manage patients living with or at-risk for HIV infection. This, in turn, can lead to missed opportunities for discussing interventions to prevent HIV infection in at-risk persons, not offering screening to help with undiagnosed individuals, or missing subtle manifestations of long-term HIV in someone with a host of other multiple chronic conditions. It also perpetuates the belief that "HIV is over"-an unfortunate myth that persists in many communities.

 

In an era when nearly 40,000 new HIV infections occur annually and an estimated 1.1 million persons are living with HIV in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019), HIV is not over. We must work to ensure that current and future generations of nurses and other health providers are knowledgeable and competent to care for all persons living with and at-risk for HIV infection. We must advocate for continued education of health professionals about the significance of HIV care. As an organization, ANAC remains committed to fulfilling this mission in partnership with our other HIV education allies, and we are committed to supporting the work of our local chapters in fulfilling this mission as well.

 

How can ANAC and our constituents help address this issue? One way is through serving as a primary education resource for our members. Through activities at the local chapters, and through national-level initiatives, we can help address this growing deficit in provider education. One of ANAC's central tenets is educating providers with the most up-to-date information on HIV and its associated co-morbidities. For some of our members and guests, the information our organization provides may be the only source of HIV education and information that they receive.

 

This year, ANAC has been proud to collaborate with Walgreens to pilot a series of regional presentations at select ANAC chapters on the benefits of nurse-pharmacist relationships and how to partner together to care for persons living with HIV. Additionally, several chapters have hosted their own regional education HIV conferences, working with local organizations to help increase HIV-specific knowledge within their communities. If you are seeking education resources for yourself, your colleagues, or your students, I would encourage you to take advantage of the online Webinars and other training information and modules available on our Web site, http://www.nursesinaidscare.org

 

Of course, one of the richest education resources that ANAC offers is our annual conference. Please plan to attend our 32nd annual conference in Portland, OR, this year. You can register online in just a few minutes. The conference committee has been working extremely hard to plan for one of the most exciting, engaging, and informative conferences in recent years. If you have not been to our annual conference, make this the year. Working together, we can help inform and educate providers, and, in turn, help improve the care of our patients.

 

Reference

 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2019). Statistics overview. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/overview/index.html[Context Link]