This proposal for a Substance Abuse and Mental Health in AIDS Center (SAMHA Center) joins the three major groups of health professionals in the San Francisco area working on these aspects of AIDS: o academic researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Berkeley o county health officials at the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH), and o minority health professionals assembled by the Bayview-Hunter's Point Foundation. The goal of the SAMHA Center is to create a working environment in which internationally known scientists from these organizations can benefit from a pooling of knowledge, skills, and community activities. This is already happening; the process of creating this proposal has spawned new collaborations among professionals, many of whom had not met when we began. The particular focus of the Center is on developing and testing preventive interventions, and on formulating and disseminating health policy guidelines. We have developed new studies in four major research areas: Psychosocial Research, Third World Issues Research, Substance Abuse Research, and Mental Health & Ethics Research. A Core Facility will operate Executive and Steering Committees that govern the Center, create a Community Forum on Mental Health and Substance Abuse Issues, and coordinate technical assistance components. Some particular strengths of our Center are: o the access to health care programs provided by the SFDPH, o the access to community populations provided by third world health professionals, o the use of existing UCSF programs to enhance the scientific quality of the research, o the use of existing UCSF programs to formulate and disseminate health policy to 22 US cities. We will use this ADAMHA grant as seed money, combining it with resources and support contributed by the sponsoring institutions, to organize a large set of activities that would not take place in the absence of this grant. We will use the resources of this grant to attract other health professionals and sources of support for multidisciplinary research on the mental health and substance abuse aspects of the AIDS epidemic.
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