Through the Peer Education Project, professors have trained hundreds of New Mexico prison inmates to spur awareness within the prison system of how to avoid chronic diseases like Hepatitis C and HIV.
As part of the program, a group of professors and health practitioners visit New Mexico prisons and train a selected number of volunteer prisoners for 40 hours.
“It started in 2009. We go in and train prisoners on how to be educators around infectious diseases, particularly Hepatitis C, HIV and addictions,” said Karla Thornton, an infectious diseases physician and a Health Sciences Center faculty member in her division.
To date, the Peer Education Project has trained 307 New Mexico inmates as prison Peer Educators, and 6,784 New Mexico inmates have received peer health education. The program is operational in seven prisons.
“They love the training,” Thornton said. “They get to know about chronic diseases and how to prevent them. They learn a lot about how to educate people. They also learn to be educators and run workshops and things like that.”
The Peer Education Project is part of a larger venture, Project ECHO, which is run by University professors and health practitioners.
According to the Health Sciences Center website, 40 percent of the New Mexico prison population suffers from Hepatitis C. There was a dire need of awareness among prisoners to prevent transmission of diseases like Hepatitis and HIV/AIDS, according to officials of Project ECHO.
“We get amazing feedback; it is a really successful program,” Thornton said. “They have accomplished their tasks successfully.”
Project ECHO was initiated by Dr. Sanjiv Arora, a liver specialist, in 2003. It came at a time when New Mexico had few practitioners treating Hepatitis C and they could not meet demands of the patients.
“New Mexico is a large state and there was only one treatment place in Albuquerque, which was hundreds of miles away from many patients,” said Andrea Bradford, communication manager at Project ECHO. “Treatment from Albuquerque would end up pretty costly and difficult for patients.”
Bradford said this was the reason Arora imagined the ‘simple but revolutionary idea’ of ECHO, where he could train an army of specialists to treat Hepatitis C.
Some of the prisoners get involved in community health projects as volunteers once they leave the prison.
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“We have a lot of them contact us after they leave the prison system, and we got them involved in community health work,” Thornton said.
From Sept. 11-13, Project ECHO will host its MetaECHO conference, which will feature talks from health care partners who are taking the ECHO model and replicating it in their own communities around the world, according to the conference’s website.
Gov. Susana Martinez will kick off the conference with a speech on Thursday, Thornton said. Other speakers will discuss the successes and challenges of implementing the ECHO model in other countries. The conference will be held at Hotel Albuquerque in Old Town.
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at assistant-news@DailyLobo.com, or on Twitter @mianfawadshah.
