Health Equity Initiative Distance-Based Curriculum

According to the CDC, single, categorical services provided to persons with multiple related risks miss significant opportunities to diagnose, treat, and prevent disease. This is exacerbated in communities that are considered “hard to reach.” Small changes in the way prevention services are delivered can make a dramatic difference by reaching a larger population with more services. It can also improve efficiency, cost-effectiveness and health outcomes. To this end, NASTAD and ASTHO are working to increase the capacity of state public health officials to collaborate across health equity/minority health, HIV, and hepatitis programs.

To achieve equitable health for all, public health officials within health departments must build trust within communities and engage them in crafting strategies to meet them where they are. Ending stigma and discrimination are important steps to achieve improved health outcomes, and ultimately, to ending the intersecting epidemics of HIV and hepatitis.

The Health Equity Initiative strives to accomplish these goals by:

1. Delivering a distance-based curriculum to all initiative participants, and
2. Convening regional trainings to focus on sharing innovative models of collaboration across state health equity/minority health, HIV, and hepatitis programs.

Participants will receive key training, tools, networking opportunities, and resources needed to advance potential partnerships within each state health department.

The audience for the Health Equity Initiative includes health department staff members responsible for programmatic oversight of the HIV prevention/surveillance, hepatitis, and minority health/health equity programs at the state level. 

The distance-based curriculum is designed to incorporate multimedia approaches to provide ongoing support the goals of the regional trainings through the life of the initiative. You will find videos and webinars from a range of national sources; key resources including fact sheets, issue briefs, and reports; real examples of state health department programmatic successes; and strategic planning templates for your use.

• BEFORE the regional training, use the learning modules to reinforce or introduce baseline knowledge pertaining to learning styles, facilitation skills, and current national priorities related to HIV, hepatitis, and health equity.
• DURING the regional training, peer health department staff will demonstrate how to use the resources and tools to broaden your reach.
• AFTER the regional training, revisit the online curriculum to access meeting materials including PowerPoint presentations, action planning templates and fact sheets to reinforce goals of interagency collaboration. The curriculum materials are living documents and will be updated based upon your feedback after each training to ensure optimal relevance and usefulness.

The curriculum houses a vast array of resources including videos, journal articles, issue briefs, toolkits, and more, as optional tools to supplement the learning module content.