Grant: Planning Grants - Priority Announcement: HIV/AIDS

Tremendous advances have made in the treatment of HIV/AIDS rendering it a manageable chronic condition. As HIV-infected persons now survive for decades after acquiring their infection, co-morbid conditions increasingly impact health care access, clinical outcomes and costs. Important co-morbidities include Hepatitis C (HCV) co-infection, poly-substance use and psychiatric illness and a growing number of chronic health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular, liver and renal disease, and cancer. In fact, multiple morbidities co-exist in the majority of HIV infected persons, increasing the complexity of their medical care. Concomitant with treatment advances, the HIV epidemic in Canada has undergone a shift and much more diverse and vulnerable populations are being affected such as injection drug users, aboriginals, new immigrants from endemic countries and increasing numbers of women. Thus a main challenge is to ensure vulnerable populations have adequate and appropriate access to care for multiple conditions simultaneously. Traditional models of HIV-focused care must now evolve to serve an expanded mandate which will encompass a wider range of primary healthcare services (e.g. integrated addictions treatment; enhancing HCV treatment evaluation and initiation; screening for specific cancers or insulin resistance). There is an increasing need to develop novel care templates that are linked to and supported by the broader community and that are patient focused. The overall goal of this CIHR Meetings Planning Grant is to provide support for a multi-stakeholder meeting to define a research agenda and framework for a team grant application that will focus on identifying and evaluating current HIV care practices, developing and implementing novel care models and assessing their effectiveness and costs with the goal of improved diagnosis, management and prevention of multi-morbidities in vulnerable populations affected by HIV and HCV and HIV-HCV co-infection.