Treatment at Gay Men's Health Crisis

The Department of Treatment Education and Advocacy (TEA) at Gay Men's Health Crisis was created in response to the rising complexity of treatments for HIV infection in the early 90s. Since then, TEA has become a pioneer on the field of treatment education.

The events that TEA makes available includes community forums, monthly seminars and special conferences. The forums focus on current issues regarding the newest developments for HIV treatment and its related complications.

Service providers can attend workshops and conferences targeted to their special needs. Some of them include working conferences that are intended to give staff from different organizations in the city the opportunity to have hands-on experience with specific topics of interest. The staff at TEA can design workshops that will meet specific objectives needed by the organizations attending them.

Workshops are targeted specifically to people who are HIV-positive or have AIDS; however, caregivers are welcome to attend. The workshops for clients/patients are designed to help the participants understand their treatments so that they can better adhere to and benefit from them.

To complement the educational workshops, there is a peer counseling program that is volunteer-staffed and peer-based, and provides one-to-one counseling for individuals with concerns and questions about their particular treatment regimens.

Besides the educational programs, TEA publishes two newsletters and a series of fact sheets: Treatment Issues is one of the most widely read treatment newsletters in the world with a circulation of 20,000 copies a month; Notas Clínicas is a Spanish language treatment newsletter on its third issue, and the Fact Sheets, which are easy to read, are issue-oriented and focus on drugs and opportunistic infections. They are available In English and Spanish. Selected ones are also available in Haition-Creole and Portuguese.

Other services include treatment advocacy and technical assistance, and a treatment library. For more information call: Library and Peer Counseling: 212.367.1455; Workshops and Forums: 212.367.1458; Treatment Issues: 212.367.1456.

Back to the April/May 1998 Issue of Body Positive Magazine.