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Drug User Intervention Trial (DUIT)

An Evidence-Based Practice

Description

This program was created as a behavioral intervention program that provided peer education skills to young intravenous drug users (IDU) that could help them and others to reduce and prevent injection and sexual behaviors that are associated with hepatitis C virus (HCV) and primary HIV.

The framework for the intervention is education and skill building. It focuses on providing skills to participants so that they can educate their peers about HIV and HCV risk reduction and is therefore considered a Peer Education Intervention (PEI). The program hopes that the educators will be motivated to change their own behaviors through educating their peers. The intervention consists of six two hour sessions over a three week period and was conducted by two facilitators with at least one facilitator being female.

Goal / Mission

The goal of this peer-education intervention is to reduce injection risk behaviors for HIV and hepatitis C virus infection in young injection drug users.

Results / Accomplishments

To evaluate the effectiveness of the program, a study compared the outcomes of a PEI group to a control group that participated in a video discussion intervention (VDI). The VDI group covered similar topics as the PEI group, but did not have any peer education; the information came only the videos. A composite index of injection drug behaviors (eg, proportion of injections in which injected with previously used syringe, did not use new syringe to divide drugs, shared cooker, proportion of partners with whom shared injection paraphernalia) was compared between the the PEI group and the VDI group before and after participation in the interventions.

The PEI showed a 29% greater decline in overall injection risk 6 months post intervention relative to the control; however, decreases in sexual risk behavior however did not differ by trial arm and HCV infection incidence did not differ significantly. The six injection outcome variables and the composite index measure were lower at the follow measurement compared to the baseline measurement among both PEI and VDI participants; the PEI arm showed declines in the composite index measures ranging from 26-39% which was greater than the VDI group although not statistically significant.

About this Promising Practice

Organization(s)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Primary Contact
Richard S. Garfein
Richard S. Garfein
University of California San Diego School of Medicine
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0507
La Jolla, CA 92093-0507
(858) 822-3018
rgarfein@ucsd.edu
Topics
Health / Alcohol & Drug Use
Organization(s)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Date of publication
2007
Date of implementation
2002
Geographic Type
Urban
Location
USA
For more details
Target Audience
Teens
Additional Audience
injection drug users
Submitted By
Michael Liu, Nancy Xiong, Ryan Saelee - UC Berkeley School of Public Health
MiCalhoun