Abstract
This paper is a brief analysis of the Minnesota African-American Women with HIV (MAAH) program. The program aims to improve compliance and support among African-American women suffering from HIV and AIDS in Minnesota. Its new nature and the lack of skilled personnel emerge as the main challenges of quantifying its rate of return. Nonetheless, this paper recommends more funding for the initiative.
Description of Public Health Initiative
The MAAH initiative is a health program that focuses on improving human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) treatment compliance and social support among African-American women living with the virus in Minnesota (Health State Minnesota, 2015). The program is a product of an ongoing regional forum series designed to improve the health outcomes of African and African-American women living with HIV in America (Edwards, 2006). This paper explores the challenges of quantifying its rate of return to find out whether it is justifiable to continue financing it.
Challenges of Quantifying the Rate of Return
Quantifying a program’s rate of return is essential to public health agencies because it helps them to maximize health outcomes from a limited pool of resources. Although many observers agree that different public health programs bring a significant return on investments (ROI) for different communities, most of them disagree with the premise for evaluation (Richard, West, & Ku, 2012). While some belief quantifying the number of lives saved is the best evaluation tool, others say calculating the net present value of a health program is the best evaluation tool (Laureate Education Inc., 2012). The lack of skilled personnel and inadequate data to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the program are the main impediments to coming up with a proper assessment of its rate of return.
The lack of skilled personnel to quantify the ROI emerges as a problem because it undermines efforts to build capacity to quantify the program’s rate of return (World Health Organization, 2013). Here, there is a high likelihood that some workers would do a poor quality job when quantifying ROI (Neumann, Jacobson, & Palmer, 2008). Consequently, inaccurate figures about the program’s health outcomes may arise (Shi & Sing, 2011). Being a relatively new initiative, MAAH’s quantification process also suffers from inadequate information to undertake a comprehensive analysis of its ROI. In this regard, it is difficult to have a holistic understanding of the program’s impact. Collectively, these challenges make it difficult to quantify the ROI for the initiative.
Is financing this Initiative Justifiable?
The principle of the rate of return argues that health agencies should allocate more funding to programs that have a high ROI (Arya, Behforouz, & Viswanath, 2009). Conversely, it also postulates that programs, which have a low ROI, should have reduced funding (Ensign, 2013). Financing the MAAH initiative is justifiable because it targets the most affected female population – African-American women. The number of African-American women suffering from HIV and AIDS in Minnesota is ten times higher than the number of white women who suffer from the same condition (Health State Minnesota, 2015; Vyavaharkar et al., 2007). Since it is a relatively new program, MAAH needs more funding because its success is likely to have a high ROI on the HIV fight in America (Getzen, 2013).
Conclusion
This paper has briefly analyzed the MAAH program, which strives to improve compliance and support among African-American women suffering from HIV. Although it has been argued that the program has a high ROI, its new nature and the lack of skilled personnel are the main challenges of quantifying its rate of return. Nonetheless, based on the ROI principle, funding the program is justifiable.
References
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