ABSTRACT
AIDS prevention efforts in the United States for out-of-treatment injection drug users (IDUs), other than a small number of activist-inspired needle exchanges, have relied almost entirely on a ‘provider-client’ model called ‘street-based outreach’. The model consists of hiring a small number of community members, usually ex-users or people with street credentials, to contact and work with members of their own community as clients. They do this by going to neighbourhoods as ‘outreach workers’ (OWs) for the purpose of distributing prevention materials and information to IDUs, and recruiting them to various programmes and services, including research interviews conducted by social scientists.
