Understanding the Roles, Responsibilities, and Competencies of Advanced Practice Registered Nurses: Instrument Development and Psychometric Testing.

Background And Purpose: Demand for primary care providers increases value for advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) to assume more independent roles. The purpose was to develop a reliable, valid instrument to measure roles, responsibilities, and competencies reflective of autonomous practice for APRNs.

Methods: Conceptual literature motivated development of a new instrument.

Quality of HIV Testing Data Before and After the Implementation of a National Data Quality Assessment and Feedback System.

Context: In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) implemented a national data quality assessment and feedback system for CDC-funded HIV testing program data.

Objective: Our objective was to analyze data quality before and after feedback.

Design: Coinciding with required quarterly data submissions to CDC, each health department received data quality feedback reports and a call with CDC to discuss the reports.

Social Marketing Risk-Framing Approaches for Dental Sealants in Rural American Indian Children.

Objective: To compare three variants of a culturally relevant and theoretically based message to determine the most influential risk-framing approach for improving intention to place dental sealants for preschool children.

Design And Sample: A convenience sample of adult, American Indian participants (n = 89) attending a community health fair were assigned to view a gain-framed, loss-framed, or mix-framed dental sealant message.

Measures: We compared participants' scores on a 46-item survey to determine the relative effect of the frame assignment on seven indices of behavior change.

Identifying the impact of social determinants of health on disease rates using correlation analysis of area-based summary information.

Objectives: We developed a statistical tool that brings together standard, accessible, and well-understood analytic approaches and uses area-based information and other publicly available data to identify social determinants of health (SDH) that significantly affect the morbidity of a specific disease.

Methods: We specified AIDS as the disease of interest and used data from the American Community Survey and the National HIV Surveillance System. Morbidity and socioeconomic variables in the two data systems were linked through geographic areas that can be identified in both systems.

Estimated HIV incidence in the United States, 2006-2009.

Background: The estimated number of new HIV infections in the United States reflects the leading edge of the epidemic. Previously, CDC estimated HIV incidence in the United States in 2006 as 56,300 (95% CI: 48,200-64,500). We updated the 2006 estimate and calculated incidence for 2007-2009 using improved methodology.

POWER for reproductive health: results from a social marketing campaign promoting female and male condoms.

Purpose: To evaluate effects of a 6-month social marketing campaign on awareness of, attitudes toward and use of female as well as male condoms for 15-25 year-old-women.

Methods: Using a time-space sampling methodology, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 3407 women at pre-campaign in 12 western U.S.

Faithfulness to partners: a means to prevent HIV infection, a source of HIV infection risks, or both? A qualitative study of women's experiences in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.

A cross-sectional study was carried out at a programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (MTCT) at a public antenatal clinic in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. The objectives were to obtain information from women concerning their reactions to HIV test results received through the programme, their experiences with faithfulness to partners as a means of primary HIV prevention for themselves and their infants, their relationships with partners, their own and their partners' experiences with HIV testing, and their knowledge of their partners' HIV serostatus. The participants were a purposive sample of 87 women who had received HIV-1-positive test results and 30 women who had received HIV-1-negative test results through the clinic's programme.

Developing an HIV behavioral surveillance system for injecting drug users: the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance System.

While disease surveillance for HIV/AIDS is now widely conducted in the United States, effective HIV prevention programs rely primarily on changing behavior; therefore, behavioral data are needed to inform these programs. To achieve the goal of reducing HIV infections in the U.S.

Epidemiology of HIV/AIDS among Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States.

Although the percentage of overall AIDS diagnoses remains low among Asian and Pacific Islanders (APIs) in the United States compared with other racial/ethnic groups, research on API risk behaviors and health status suggest that the low number of AIDS cases may not provide a full picture of the epidemic and issues faced by this understudied and underserved population. Data from national HIV/AIDS surveillance systems and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) were examined to delineate the magnitude and course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic among APIs in the United States. Same-sex sexual activity is the main HIV risk for API men, whereas heterosexual contact is for API women.

Women's reasons for not participating in follow up visits before starting short course antiretroviral prophylaxis for prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV: qualitative interview study.

Objective: To find out why pregnant women who receive HIV-1 positive test results and are offered short course antiretroviral prophylaxis to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child do not participate in necessary follow up visits before starting prophylaxis.

Design: Qualitative interview study.

Setting: A programme aiming to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child at a public antenatal clinic in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.