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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Development of an Animated Video Presentation on Rapid HIV Testing for Pre-Test Counseling in Traditional and Non-traditional Testing Settings

Roland C. Merchant, MD, MPH, Emergency Medicine and Community Health, Brown Medical School, Rhode Island Hospital, 593 Eddy Street, Providence, RI 02903, (401) 444-5109, rmerchant@lifespan.org, Erin Gee, BA, Emergency Medicine, Rhode Island Hospital, 593 Eddy Street, Providence, RI 02903, George Seage, ScD, MPH, Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, Kenneth H. Mayer, MD, Infectious Diseases, Brown University/The Miriam Hospital/Fenway Community Health, 164 Summit Avenue, Providence, RI 02906, and Melissa Clark, PhD, Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research, Brown University, Box G-H1, Providence, RI 02912.

Issues: Providing pre-test information in a crowded emergency department (ED) without HIV counseling staff remains a challenge. A reusable, standardized, and comprehensible means of delivering rapid HIV pre-test information would be preferable for patients and staff.

Description: We created a 9.5 minute animated and standard feature video presentation on rapid HIV testing for a high patient volume, urban, northeastern US ED. The video can be viewed privately on a Tablet PC and listened to discretely with headphones. The video consists of CDC-suggested elements of HIV pre-test fundamentals and essential information on rapid HIV testing with OraQuick®. The development process included evaluating existing videos on standard HIV testing, reviewing standard HIV testing video studies, creating an educational framework to guide the video's message, preparing a script, ensuring a 7th grade script reading level, designing racially and culturally-appropriate animated characters for the story line, producing graphic sequences, selecting video images, and pilot testing the rough version. We conducted a qualitative analysis of the video among ED patient volunteers using in-person structured interviews. The final video reflects patient suggestions regarding the content, style, theme, language, cultural and age appropriateness, and length of the video.

Lessons Learned: Patients provided invaluable feedback on the video and were enthusiastic on its potential usage in the ED. We are evaluating its effectiveness in a randomized controlled trial.

Recommendations: This freely-available video in CD/DVD format is a useful substitute for in-person pre-test counseling, particularly in settings where the availability of counselors and in which patient privacy are limited.

Learning Objectives:

Keywords: HIV/AIDS, Education

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered

Emerging Issues in HIV Counseling and Testing

The 134th Annual Meeting & Exposition (November 4-8, 2006) of APHA