The District’s health director has launched an aggressive drive to improve the government’s response to HIV/AIDS, instructing his staff to develop disease response and prevention plans, distribute condoms and organize its HIV data — all within a three-month period.
Dr. Gregg Pane, who took charge of the health department’s troubled HIV/AIDS Administration in early January, now realigns the administration and marshals its resources to tackle a series of “critical tasks” within 90 days. One in 20 District residents is infected with HIV and one in 50 is living with AIDS.
“I felt action was needed,” Pane said Thursday. “We’re all saying it’s a crisis. Let’s do something. Shake it up and set some goals.”
The “call to action,” divides the HIV/AIDS Administration into six bureaus: Office of the Senior Director, grants management and fiscal control, surveillance and epidemiology, prevention and intervention, primary care and case management, and community outreach. The retooling, Pane said, will “simplify the buckets of activity.”
The plan calls for delivering 250,000 condoms to 60 nonprofits by Valentine’s Day, handing HIV rapid test kits to doctors, developing a comprehensive HIV prevention effort for District youth, rethinking grant management and conducting oversight visits of the government’s service providers.
Most crucial of the “overdue” tasks, Pane said, will be the entry of 1,200 backlogged HIV surveillance cases into District databases, a critical tool to track the epidemic or apply for federal grant funding.
D.C. Appleseed, a nonprofit organization that has reviewed the HIV/AIDS response for several years, contributed to the plan’s blueprint, Pane said. In its second report card on the government’s efforts, released in December, D.C. Appleseed said the city has made progress, but top officials “have not remained engaged leaders on this issue.”
“My reaction is it’s a very good thing that Dr. Pane this quickly is trying to get organized and give this thing high priority, high visibility,” D.C. Appleseed executive director Walter Smith said.
