Groupwork at GMFA

GMFA has always provided free groupwork courses for gay men. Since 1992 over ten thousand gay men have been trained in our skills-based programme of workshops and in recent years we have delivered groupwork to over 1,000 men per year.

In 2007-2008 GMFA offered 63 HIV prevention courses in London, which amounted to 854 hours of workshops attended by 813 men.

We have a range of two-hour workshops which give all the basic information on HIV exposure, transmission, harm reduction and PEP. These shorter workshops are designed to attract men who could not attend full day workshops. They also give GMFA the ability to provide training to youth groups and student gay groups.

All of our workshops are facilitated by volunteers, and all workshop facilitators are independently trained by Health First, NHS health promotion specialists. Some courses require facilitators to complete additional specialist training.

Each workshop has between 18 and 24 participants, and 96% of participants state they would recommend our courses to a friend.

GMFA also delivered eight smoking- cessation courses in 2007-08. Each course consists of seven two-hour workshops. The course is based on the NHS smoking-cessation course with some adaptation to take account of gay social pressures to smoke, and of possible interactions between HIV medications and some nicotine replacement therapies.

The availability of a new stop smoking drug, Champix, has had a positive impact on the participants of the courses who choose to use the drug to help stop smoking. In 2007-08 the GMFA Stop Smoking course had a 74.6% quit rate, to put this in perspective the NHS equivalent course has a general success rate of 55%.

In addition to this, GMFA ran the pilot year of NHS funded National Groupwork, running HIV prevention workshops in partnership with agencies from eleven other cities in England and Wales. Three courses were run in each partner city, The Sex Course, Building Your Confidence and Getting a Boyfriend, giving a total of 264 hours run. In addition two Basic Facilitation Skills courses were run to train staff from the partner agencies.

Click to see GMFA’s current programme of groupwork.