Associate Professor Katryna McCoy’s HIV Prevention Project Spotlighted
Published with permission from the Implementation Science Coordination Initiative, which provides deep dives on research and findings from supplement projects funded by the National Institutes of Health as part of the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the United States initiative.
HIV transmission disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities. In the United States, Black and African American people (hereafter referred to as Black communities) are only 12 percent of the population but comprised 37 percent of people living with HIV in 2022, the highest rate of any single race or ethnicity. The intersection of racism, longstanding systemic inequities, residential segregation, and social and economic marginalization are just some of the factors that collectively reduce access to HIV prevention and treatment for Black communities.
Disparities in HIV acquisition are even greater for Black women. HIV incidence among Black women is ten times higher than that of white women and four times higher than that of Latina women. Black women also make up the majority (50 percent) of new HIV diagnoses among women, when only 15 percent of all women in the United States are Black.
In Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, these racial and gender disparities are prominent, but they are not inevitable. The 2021 EHE supplement project, “Enhancing Strategies to Engage Providers in Efforts to Eliminate HIV: Project EnSTEP,” led by Katryna McCoy, Ph.D., FNP, through the University of North Carolina’s Center for AIDS Research (CFAR), focuses on engaging Black cisgender women in HIV prevention services in Mecklenburg County. McCoy’s project achieves this through two primary means: 1) implementing community-derived pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) awareness campaigns tailored to the needs of Black cisgender women, and 2) developing implementation strategies to enhance healthcare providers’ communication about HIV prevention with Black cisgender women.
While Project EnSTEP is largely focused on Black women, McCoy also wanted to address disparities that affect access to HIV care for all people in Mecklenburg County. To do this, McCoy and the Project EnSTEP team implemented an incentive-based strategy with “testing tickets,” vouchers that reimbursed transportation costs when receiving HIV care and prevention services to help address financial barriers to care.