Individually-tailored support and education for safer injection

The Eurosider project is a transferability study to implement in 4 European countries an individually-tailored support and education for safer injection (ITSESI) for people who inject drugs. This community-based intervention has already shown its effectiveness in reducing HIV-HCV risk practices in France. INSERM (France), AIDES (France), Correlation Network (Netherland) take in charge the coordination. Praksis (Greece), ARAS (Romania), IHF (Bulgaria) and GAT (Portugal) implement the project on the field. The project will last for 24 months.

Methods of Eurosider: The project uses mixed methods and implementation science. It started with a first exploratory step using quantitative data of each local context chosen for the implementation of the ITSESI intervention and some qualitative interviews with key informers. The second phase consists in implementing and evaluating this community-based educational intervention, starting with a training process in the selected contexts.

Workshop objectives: To present the ITSESI training metho: The session will be a participative and interactive session based on the ITSESI training method used for the harm reduction fieldworkers. From the video of injection practice, participants can understand how to use the observation check list and to provide adapted advices to the users. They can also appropriate the tools and the methods to implement and to evaluate this kind of harm reduction intervention. Finally it will be likewise the opportunity to design the peers’ involvement, the advocacy part and the environmental conditions (legal, material, and ethical) needed to reach the reduction of HCV/HIV transmission through the education and support. In the purpose of scaling up ITSESI at European level, this workshop will be the first step for promoting and sharing the experience. The speakers will come from the Eurosider coordination and the local partners who have already implemented ITSESI on the field. The discussion will take into account of the contextualization of the intervention in the different European contexts.