PrEP / Prevention

The prevention working group focuses strategies to promote equitable access to HIV prevention services in the East Bay, particularly among our most vulnerable communities, with a focus on comprehensive HIV & STI testing, sex positive health care, home-based/self-testing, and biomedical interventions such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), and treatment-as-prevention (TasP). Since its inception in 2017, this working group has continued to track rates of PrEP use across the East Bay and worked to develop a system for collecting demographic data among PrEP users in order to identify and characterize racial and ethnic disparities in PrEP access and usage. This working group also aims to strategize effective ways to address PrEP inequities and trends through access to same-day PrEP, generic oral PrEP, and injectable PrEP. Other areas of focus to promote PrEP equity include access to PrEP among minors, cis- and trans-women of color, people who use drugs, and people experiencing homelessness.

The East Bay Prevention Group’s strategic priorities for 2020 to 2025:
1. Adopt innovative models of care to increase access to PrEP and HIV care
2. Build mobile and community-based healing-centered one-stop shops
3. Lower systemic barriers to HIV testing and prevention services through policy and program innovation.
4. Offer integrated same-day access to mental health and substance use services
5. Use inclusive, intentional messaging to inspire hope and engagement in services,
6. Train staff to implement these strategies in a trauma-informed and healing-centered way
…To achieve 50% PrEP coverage and a 75% reduction in new diagnoses.