A new PrEP project for the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking diaspora aims to increase awareness and uptake of PrEP across North Central London (NCL), with a special focus on underserved communities.
It is a new HIV prevention partnership project between Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) and Aymara Social Enterprise.
CNWL has sub-contracted to Aymara as part of its wider NCL PrEP Programme, as Aymara’s model for PrEP promotion “has been demonstrated to effectively engage Latin American communities in Lambeth and Southwark”. This is what Dominic Reilly, director of the programme, said.
Indeed, the project is important and necessary because at the population level, migrancy status is a risk factor for HIV, with 46% of people being newly diagnosed with HIV in 2023 being born outside the UK (6% were born in Latin America, 9% in Asia and 31% in Africa).
Reasons include relatively higher prevalence of HIV in some communities, and failure of health services to engage communities, resulting in lower levels of testing and take-up of HIV prevention methods such as PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis).
This is why the project is so important and so much is expected of it, as Aymara specialises in addressing health inequalities among racially minoritized communities, especially non-Anglophone migrants.
Its developed model situates service users systemically, addressing wider determinants that often cause people to de-prioritise managing their health, such as housing, employment, and immigration status.
As part of the PrEP for Migrants project they will provide health promotion outreach, point-of-care HIV testing, case work support, and PrEP Peer Champion workshops to migrant communities across the NCL boroughs of Camden, Islington, Haringey and Barnet.
The NCL PrEP Programme was established in 2022 to support delivery of HIV PrEP prevention as a new routine service available at NHS sexual health clinics.
Projects have included the co-designed ‘Be PrEPared’ multimedia campaign focused on gay-bi-and-other-men-who-have-sex-with-men (GBMSM), a suite of activities researching and addressing the HIV prevention needs of Black African communities, and development of a clinical model to initiate PrEP in community settings. The NCL PrEP Programme will run until June 2025.
Dominic Reilly has said they were pleased to work with this Latin American organisation “on this highly targeted work, which addresses a longstanding and worsening health inequity around HIV prevention for heterosexual migrants.”
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