Marsha Atkind, executive director of the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, said creating an engaging message to at-risk women will have an important effect on people’s health.
January 15, 2009
The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey and the child of a Holocaust survivor are teaming up to fight the AIDS virus with an unusual weapon — a soap opera.
Thanks to a $155,000 production grant from the foundation, a team headed by a Rutgers University faculty member is creating 12 episodes of an “urban soap.”
The story, with a strong message about preventing the spread of HIV, will focus on the lives and relationships of four inner-city women.
The 20-minute videos will be shown to a group of African-American and Latino women in Newark and Jersey City. Another group — ranging in age from 18 to 29 — will receive text messages, but no videos, about preventing HIV.
The project is the brainchild of Rachel Jones, an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s College of Nursing in Newark.
Rutgers University nursing professor Rachel Jones said she is motivated by the experiences of her mother, a Holocaust survivor.
Photo courtesy Rutgers University School of Nursing
“We will study whether there is a difference between the two groups in risk behavior,” said Jones.
That study will be funded by a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Jones said it will examine the effectiveness of the message delivered via the videos and texts to the people at highest risk in America for contracting HIV.
“Black and Latina women constitute 24 percent of women in the United States, but they make up 82 percent of American women with full-blown AIDS,” said foundation executive director Marsha Atkind.
Although it is important that men also receive messages about safe sex, Jones said, “the epidemic has turned particularly toward young African-American women. We are also beginning to work with men. Because we study one group, it doesn’t mean we think another group is unimportant.”
“Most people know the risk of HIV, and they know if you use a condom you are lowering your risk substantially,” said Atkind. “But in the heat of the moment, they don’t use one. The idea is that if you just preach to women, they don’t listen. But if you create something that is engaging and will catch their attention, it will have a very important health effect.”
Risk reduction
Fighting the HIV virus is a goal that has captivated Jones since she became a nursing student in the 1970s. “I wanted to stay in inner cities and deal with public health problems,” she said.
Jones said she had lost “many friends” to AIDS before anti-retroviral drugs stopped diagnoses from becoming death sentences. “I decided I would dedicate my work to health promotion and HIV risk reduction.”
Part of her motivation comes from her mother, a Holocaust survivor who fled to Peru from Nazi Germany. Another impetus, she said, is that she is “a product of the civil rights movement.”
Atkind called Jones’ effort “fantastic” and a worthy investment for the foundation, which was established with proceeds from the sale of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center to the Saint Barnabas Health Care System.
“We love to seed a project that we feel could become very important in improving people’s health,” Atkind said, “then have it become sustainable or have someone else take it over and have the outcome really researched, so that it can be duplicated in other places.”
That is Jones’ idea as well.
“We may not be able to reach everyone, but we will reach many, and we think that we will be able to disseminate this research and these videos widely,” she said. “If the findings of our study are successful, we will distribute the videos through cable and every other way we can.”
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