Partnership to help those living with AIDS

A partnership between the Northern Colorado AIDS Project, Salud Family Health Centers and Rocky Mountain CARES is providing HIV/AIDS treatment to low-income patients in the region whose lives depend on getting regular monitoring and medication.

Salud, which operates clinics for low-income people across Northern Colorado, is providing space in its Fort Collins office one day a month for HIV/AIDS patients who – prior to the partnership – had to find transportation to clinics in Denver or Boulder.

The Salud clinic is located at 1635 Blue Spruce Drive in north Fort Collins. Specialized HIV/AIDS treatment is being provided by Benjamin Young and John Hammer, physicians with Rocky Mountain CARES in Denver.

“I’m very excited about the Northern Colorado Collaborative Care Clinic,´ said Young. “It is an innovative collaboration that combines advocacy and health agencies and HIV experts to bring high-quality case management and medical care to high-risk individuals in their communities, in their languages.”

Doug Whitman, physician at Salud clinic in Fort Collins, said the partnership is another expression of Salud’s mission to provide the best care possible to those who would not otherwise be able to obtain it.

“Community health centers are built to provide health-care access to those who might not have access to high-quality health care elsewhere, and to do that in their own local community just makes sense,” Whitman said.

Whitman said HIV/AIDS patients who visit the clinic will also have access to mental health counseling through a partnership with Health District of Northern Colorado.

“If we can provide (AIDS treatment) and also expand the service with mental health care, that’s something we want to do,” he said.

Jeff Basinger is executive director of Northern Colorado AIDS Project, which is about to begin its 25th year of operation. NCAP, located at 400 Remington Street in Fort Collins and with a satellite office at 914 11th St. in Greeley, provides a wide variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS, including testing, case management, counseling, a food bank and housing and other assistance.

Extending lives

Basinger said the Northern Colorado clinic partnership, which took more than a year to create, will help get low-income AIDS patients to treatment and extend their lives. “The distance (to Denver or Boulder) is a real barrier for people,” he said. “There are no HIV docs up here who provide this kind of treatment for the uninsured. Our local patients can now get local HIV specialty care.”

Basinger said NCAP has been allocating about $16,000 of its budget each year toward helping patients get transportation to Denver or Boulder for treatment, and the Fort Collins clinic should help NCAP be able to spend that money on other needed services.

“That’s our hope,” he said.

AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, was first identified in the early 1980s when gay men began to quickly die of a new kind of disease.

Researchers discovered the disease lowered the body’s immune system and left it open to opportunistic infections. HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is the organism that infects through blood, semen, vaginal fluids or infected needles.

Although there’s no cure, advances in medication over the last 30 years have helped many survive the disease and led to a growing public perception that AIDS has been cured. But that’s definitely not the case, Basinger said, noting there are 1.3 million people – both gay and heterosexual – living with the disease in the United States and an estimated 56,000 new cases each year.

A total of 202 people in Larimer County and 142 people in Weld County are living with HIV or AIDS, according to a state health department report through Sept. 30. About 40 percent of those report themselves heterosexual, Basinger said, making it an ongoing threat to a wide portion of the population.

“It’s important to remind people that the “H” in HIV stands for human, regardless of race, gender or religion,” he said.

Basinger, who has been living with HIV/AIDS since 1985, said while prejudice against those with AIDS has diminished greatly over the last 30 years, it’s still an obstacle to getting people treated.

“The stigma here in Northern Colorado is still very alive and well and the fear drives the infection rate and keeps people out of care,” he said.

Steve Porter covers health care for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-232-3147 or sporter@ncbr.com.

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