Vaginal microbicides may improve prevention outcomes for high-risk inner-city women.

In fall 2011, the South Carolina Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (SC Campaign), with funding from Office of Adolescent Health, began replicating an evidence-based curriculum, It's Your Game, Keep It Real in 12 middle schools across South Carolina. Fidelity of the curriculum was monitored by the use of lesson fidelity logs completed by curriculum facilitators and lesson observation logs submitted by independent classroom observers. These data were monitored weekly to identify possible threats to fidelity. The innovative model Fidelity Through Informed Technical Assistance and Training was developed by SC Campaign to react to possible fidelity threats in real time, through a variety of technical assistance modalities. Fidelity Through Informed Technical Assistance and Training guided the 55 hours of technical assistance delivered by the SC Campaign during the first year of It's Your Game, Keep It Real implementation to 18 facilitators across 12 SC middle schools, and achieved 98.4% curriculum adherence and a high quality of implementation scores.

Getting To Outcomes (GTO), an innovative framework for planning, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining interventions has been shown to be effective in helping community-based organizations (CBOs) introduce science-based approaches into their prevention work. However, the Interactive Systems Framework (ISF) suggests that adopting innovations like GTO requires a significant amount of capacity building through training and technical assistance (T/TA). In this study, 11 CBOs and three schools in South Carolina entered into a 3 year program of intense and proactive T/TA based on the ISF to learn how to apply an adaptation of GTO (Promoting Science-Based Approaches-Getting To Outcomes, PSBA-GTO) to their teen pregnancy prevention programs. Using semi-structured interviews, the partnering organizations were assessed at three points in time, pre-T/TA, 12 months, and post T/TA (30 months) for their performance of the steps of GTO in their work. The seven organizations which participated in T/TA until the end of the project received an average of 76 h of TA and 112 h of training per organization. Interview results showed increased performance of all 10 steps of PSBA-GTO by these organizations when conducting their teen pregnancy programs. These results suggest targeted and proactive T/TA can successfully bridge the gap between research and practice by using a three part delivery system, as prescribed in the ISF, which relies on an intermediary prevention support system to ensure accurate and effective translation of research to the everyday work of community-based practitioners.

Community-based organizations (CBOs) have been providing HIV prevention services to priority populations for many years. Recent research suggests that CBOs could benefit from capacity building to strengthen their public health prevention knowledge and skills, including ability to access and use behavioral science to guide prevention efforts. A cross-sectional survey of 316 CBOs was conducted to assess desire and preferences for training, support for training at the organizational level, motivation for training at the individual level, barriers to training, and factors associated with the perceived need for training. Results suggest the need for a national training initiative to increase CBO capacity.

The original studies' behavioral effects were not replicated in this population, possibly as a result of this being an effectiveness trial instead of an efficacy trial, counterfactual exposure design issues, or postprogram exposure to evidence-based programming.