Friday, May 9, 2025
5/9/2025
Enhancing STI and Sexual Health Clinic Infrastructure (ESSHCI) Program - FHCSD proposes a five-year clinic infrastructure strengthening project to expand access to comprehensive sexual health services for a total 14,938 high-risk individuals in San Diego County who are disproportionately affected by bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STI) such as gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia. This application includes Strategies A, B, and C. It aims to expand access to reach an additional 1,772 men who have sex with men and Transgender individuals; as well as 586 additional youth aged 15-24 years; and 1,470 Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx/Chicano San Diegans who would not otherwise receive STI prevention and care. FHCSD will achieve our targets by fostering community engagement and collaboration with public health partners to enhance and inform our STI prevention/care and comprehensive sexual health services (CSHS) program. Our clinic infrastructure assessment and expansion planning will focus on enhancing the clinical capacity of existing primary care services at FHCSD’s Hillcrest Night Clinic, FamilyHealth at City College, Diamond Neighborhoods Family Health Center, and Chula Vista Family Health Center. This will be supported by extensive outreach, health education, and patient engagement including a high-impact five-year information, education, and communication (IEC) campaign that includes distribution of top-quality condoms and lube; program marketing such as billboards and Spanish radio ads; and linguistically adapted IEC materials about the STI epidemic, high-risk behavior, and safer sex strategies. Each clinical infrastructure assessment will include a gap analysis and training plan in Year 1 to identify and prioritize the enhancements needed to achieve STI Specialty Clinic status at each of the targeted clinic locations, such as by implementing a new 3-site protocol for STI detection and working toward laboratory certification that meets International Organization (ISO) 9001 quality standards. FHCSD’s high-quality training program will focus on STI and CSHS topics for clinical and non-clinical staff and will be developed in coordination with our local health jurisdiction as well as the California Prevention Training Center. Through this program, FHCSD will expand our roster of collaborative public health partners to include quarterly clinic-level STI Community Advisory Board meetings with input from the San Diego LGBT Community Center, San Diego Youth Services, and the Mother, Child & Adolescent HIV Care Program at UCSD’s Owen Clinic; as well as an annual STI Update Conference that strengthens the STI prevention and CSHS provision capacity of other service providers and partners across San Diego County in coordination with the American Academy of Pediatrics-California Chapter 3, the Faith-Based Action Committee (FBAC), and the San Diego National Association of Hispanic Nurses. Under the cross-departmental leadership of the proposed ESSHCI Program Director, FHCSD will improve each clinic’s utilization rates by at least 10% per year by increasing patient clinic experience/satisfaction levels; integrating STI outreach and linkage to care as well as health education and health system navigation within existing substance use disorder and syringe services programs; and spearheading a collaborative program evaluation and data management process at each location to further measure and drive access to STI prevention and sexual health clinical services. Our data architecture and QI/QA processes will facilitate inreach efforts to identify additional HIV-negative patients who would benefit from clinic-based STI screening/testing and vaccinations for other viral STIs such as for HBV, HPV, and MPX; and expand access to supportive care such mental health services, psychosocial support, and transportation assistance, with a focus on uninsured, underinsured, and low-income persons within each priority population disproportionately impacted by the STI epidemic.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).