Yale School of Medicine’s Sandra Springer, MD, associate professor of medicine (infectious diseases) and associate clinical professor of nursing, and her collaborators were recently awarded an innovative new grant funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for ‘Addressing Risk Through Community Treatment for Infectious Disease and Opioid Use Disorder Now (ACTION)’ among justice-involved individuals. This initiative is a multi-site collaboration with Texas Christian University (TCU), the University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW), and Yale University along with their community and Department of Corrections partners.
The five-year project will compare Patient Navigation to Mobile Health Unit service delivery for persons who are released from prisons and jails with a history of pre-incarceration opioid use and/ or injection drug use who are either living with HIV or at risk of acquiring HIV. Individuals recently released from prison and jail will be linked to community-based HIV and opioid use disorder prevention and treatment service care including pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), antiretroviral therapy, medications for opioid use disorder, hepatitis C (HCV) treatment, naloxone, and syringe services programs.
The new Yale-HIV NIDA Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network JCOIN hub will be joining the JCOIN network and is the first JCOIN HIV specific hub focusing on HIV prevention and treatment service delivery for persons released from the criminal justice setting. Springer and her Yale-HIV ACTION JCOIN team were awarded over $11M for this initiative on September 23, 2020. Springer and her team will conduct the study in the New London, Windham, and Tolland counties in Connecticut, which have been hit hard by the opioid epidemic. Additionally, these counties have high rates of HIV and HCV related to injection drug use. In addition, she is partnering with Kevin Knight, PhD, at TCU and Tarrant County, Texas, and Ank Nijhawan, MD, at UTSW and Dallas County, Texas.
If you would like to learn more about the InSTRIDE research program, please visit its website.