Westat to Provide Health Marketing Support for Let’s Stop HIV Together Initiative

Raising awareness among all Americans about HIV and reducing the risk of HIV transmission among the hardest-hit populations—gay and bisexual men, transgender people and African Americans, and Latinx—are key factors in ending the HIV epidemic.

Westat has been awarded a 5-year health marketing support services contract to provide communications and partnership development support for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Let’s Stop HIV Together (Together), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) initiative.

Westat will be supporting the CDC through coordination across Together’s primary focus areas: testing, prevention, treatment, and stigma. We will develop health communication resources, engage strategic partners that reach communities disproportionately impacted by HIV, and provide training and technical assistance to those partners.

The goals of these efforts are to

• Support the Together portfolio and related communications projects and partnership development efforts
• Increase implementation of HIV screening and treatment practices in health care settings
• Offer a biomedical intervention through pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP)
• Promote sustained medical care to achieve viral suppression

“We look forward to continuing our support for CDC’s HIV prevention partners. We will leverage our experience to develop resources and communications strategies that help public health agencies, HIV prevention programs, and health care providers achieve EHE’s goal of reducing HIV infections by 90% over the next decade, ” says Belinda Gaston, M.P.H, a Senior Study Director and the contract’s project director.