Brighton leads Europe-wide research

The survey is the first of its kind to target community health workers who provide sexual health support including counselling, testing, and psychosocial care for MSM.

Gay and bisexual men and other MSM have been most affected by HIV infections in the EU throughout the history of the HIV epidemic. Subsequently, gay communities in Europe have responded to the HIV epidemic with unprecedented community mobilisation including the creation of a wide variety of local, national and international initiatives and organisations engaging in HIV prevention, counselling and social support, advocacy, community-based research, and information and education of the community.

The new online survey, ECHOES (European Community Health Worker Online Survey) is part of a larger research project ‘ESTICOM (European Surveys and Training to Improve MSM Community Health)’ to find ways of improving access to health care and thereby improve the quality of prevention and diagnosis of HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and viral hepatitis.

Photo by Stanley Dai on Unsplash

Dr Nigel Sherriff

ESTICOM has been funded to the tune of €2m by the Consumers, Health, Agriculture and Food Executive Agency of the European Commission.

The ECHOES survey has been developed by the University of Brighton’s Dr Nigel Sherriff, Principal Research Fellow, with Professor Jörg Huber, Professor of Health Sciences, both from the university’s School of Health Sciences, along with Nick McGlynn, Lecturer from the School of Environment and Technology.

Dr Sherriff said: “The overall aim is to assess the knowledge, attitudes and practices of community based health workers providing health services for MSM. It will provide the baseline for the evaluation and further improvement of training programmes and materials for training of community health workers working with MSM and for quality improvement of the services provided for MSM.

“We hope as many workers as possible throughout Europe who provide sexual health services for MSM in the community will take part. This will be crucial to help ensure the findings are able to inform future policy priorities for the European Commission and its member states.”

Early findings are expected in the Spring of 2018.