California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center at UCLA/APLA
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: The California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center at UCLA/APLA (The Southern California Center) is a collaboration primarily between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), with participation by the Los Angeles LGBT Center (LA LGBTC). The over-arching goal of The Southern California Center is to bring the most relevant and timely evidence to bear on HIV/AIDS policy making in order to further California�s efforts to develop and maintain efficient, cost-effective, and accessible programs and services to people with or at risk for HIV/AIDS. To do so, the Southern California Center will engage in rapid response research, the purpose of which is to quickly (within a six month time frame) identify, formulate and analyze emergent policy research questions and disseminate findings to key stakeholders. Meaningful rapid response research will be accomplished via our focus on three goals: to identify and prioritize emerging HIV/AIDS policy issues; to maintain a data infrastructure to address emerging policy issues; and to bring relevant research findings to bear on policy issues, either by bringing existing research to the attention of policy makers, and/or by stimulating new research. The Southern California Center relies heavily on the knowledge and advice of the Policy Research Advisory Committee (PRAC) to identify and prioritize emerging HIV/AIDS policy issues. The PRAC is a group of HIV/AIDS stakeholders representing a diverse range of community-based organizations; local, county and state health departments; planning councils; academia; and health care providers and insurers. In addition to the PRAC, think tanks have been and will continue to be another vehicle to seek stakeholder input, especially for pressing policy issues that call for more in-depth analysis. The Southern California Center will also implement a Policy Research Fellows Program in order to expand the involvement of CBOs in soliciting stakeholder input and building community capacity for HIV policy research. The Southern California Center�s wide network of established relationships with researchers based at other UCLA entities (e.g., CHIPTS, the UCLA AIDS Institute, and the Williams Institute) will allow the team to draw on a wide range of expertise in addressing a variety of policy issues, such as: racial/ethnic disparities; technology and social networks; incarcerated populations; health reform; financing and delivery of medical care; PrEP/PEP; drug and substance abuse; HIV testing; immigration; housing; and criminalization of HIV. The Southern California Center has a seven-year track record in producing rapid response policy research studies. These studies have and will continue to address issues related to HIV/AIDS surveillance, epidemiology, prevention and care, as well as focus on emerging issues in the context of the shifting landscape of health care as it is provided at the local, state, and national levels. Through these studies, the Southern California Center will continue to produce new knowledge that will significantly impact the HIV/AIDS policy landscape in California, and as a result will continue to contribute to the improvement of HIV/AIDS prevention and care services for affected persons and populations in California.