The Urgent Need to Respond to HIV- and HCV-Related Risk Practices among Youth in Ottawa Who Smoke Crack.

A community-based research project, sought to provide evidence to respond to the community-identified need to more fully understand the parameters of the social and risk profiles of youth in Ottawa who smoked crack. In this article we examine engagement in HIV and HCV risk-related smoking practices, and experiences accessing safer inhalation supplies with the objective of identifying potential intervention points and associated harm reduction interventions to initiate and support safer inhalation practices. The study comprised four sequential components - formation and facilitation of a Youth Project team, qualitative interviews, and member checking workshops - each component building on the preceding and all contributing to the final and fourth component of the interviewer-administered quantitative survey from which data for this article are drawn.

Increasing the Offer, Shifting the Offer: Patients' Perspectives on Routinely Offering HIV Counseling and POC Testing in the Health Services Program of an Urban Community Health Centre.

Canadian epidemiologic data demonstrate the fallibility of established HIV testing approaches to reach, diagnose, and link to care a significant portion of the population thereby contributing to missed opportunities to reduce onward HIV transmission. Increasing and diversifying entry points to accessing HIV testing may be a successful strategy to reach people who remain undiagnosed. We sought to determine the perspectives of patients on the acceptability of an offer of routine non-targeted provider-initiated HIV counseling and point-of-care (POC) testing in the health services program of a Community Health Centre in downtown Ottawa, the capital of Canada.