Since 2006, AHP’s HIV Counseling and Testing Component has conducted over 4,000 HIV tests a year. AHP also currently provides case management to 200 people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), facilitating linkage to care and comprehensive service delivery. AHP has delivered syringe exchange services to nearly 6,000 individuals. Since 2002, AHP has provided over 800 clients with case management.

AHP’s risk based strategy targets high-risk groups such as injection drug users, sex workers, men who have sex with men (MSM), high-risk Latino/a, African American men and women, immigrants and homeless individuals. Data from the most recent calendar year of service (2010) reveals the following: 4,287 clients tested for HIV,1.95% of clients testing positive for HIV, and 83.3% of clients successfully linked to HIV primary care. AHP has established a memorandum of understanding with a number of area hospitals ensuring that individuals that test positive for HIV are quickly able to receive primary and specialty care.

Our target population includes PLWHA who are uninsured, Medicaid-ineligible, and out of care. In particular, the project targets immigrants, both naturalized citizens and undocumented, and provides services in the neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn (Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville) and Eastern Brooklyn (Bushwick and East New York), in NYC. The service area and target population were selected because of the high numbers of PLWHA that receive inadequate health care, including a large HIV-positive immigrant population. The service area’s diverse immigrant population is primarily from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Jamaica, the Caribbean, and South America. The immigrant groups in the service area are associated with high rates of HIV (e.g., Haitian-born adult immigrants have four times the rate of new HIV diagnoses as NYC’s foreign-born population), and many immigrants are undocumented—less than half are naturalized citizens. Further barriers to care in the target population can be attributed to poverty, language barriers, difficulty navigating the health care system, and social norms, beliefs and values that stigmatize HIV.