News Release
October 2005
Bethlehem, Pa., Monday, October 11, 2005—Allen C. Smith III, the first R.N. to
go through Moravian College’s baccalaureate nursing program and receive the Bachelor
of Science, is a pioneer in community health partnerships dealing with AIDS. His most
recent project is a series of HIV community meetings for the Lehigh Valley area. The
second meeting occurred last month.
Smith, who graduated with the charter class of nurses from St. Luke’s
Hospital School of Nursing at Moravian College in 2003, is continuous quality improvement
coordinator with the AIDS Activities Office at Lehigh Valley Hospital. His nursing
certification is from the former Allentown Memorial Hospital, which was acquired by
Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network.
On September 15 at the Glasbern Country Inn in Fogelsville, the AIDS activities office
and the community group FACT (Fighting AIDS Continuously Together) co-sponsored the second
HIV community meeting, a response to the positive feedback about the initial meeting
six months ago.
The event brought together private physicians; staff members at
Lehigh Valley Hospital, St. Luke's Hospital, Sacred Heart Hospital, and Easton Hospital;
Bethlehem and Allentown’s
health departments and Carbon/Monroe/Pike Drug and Alcohol Commission; community groups
such as Latinos for Healthy Communities; and Northampton and Lehigh County prisons. “The
list becomes larger with every event,” Smith says.
Because of thinner government funding, Smith says, local health agencies and providers
must learn to work together and share resources. As an example, he points out that Lehigh
Valley and St. Luke's Hospitals' HIV clinics will co-sponsor the second annual HIV client
education program in April 2006.
He also notes that the HIV committee formed from the first community
meeting is developing a multiple-provider handbook of HIV services in and around the
Lehigh Valley. “This
is what community health-care is all about,” he says.
He has worked in the AIDS Activities Office for eight years and collected data for
research studies by Dr. Margaret Terry, a specialist in infectious diseases. They presented
their work together at the World AIDS conferences in 2002 in Barcelona, Spain, and in
2003 in Paris. Their research tracks HIV-infected patients with a history of hepatitis
A and B to see how medications for one condition affect the other.
In an e-mail to Janet Sipple, dean of Moravian’s School of Nursing, Smith wrote: “Moravian
College has given me the tools to do something that no one else in the Lehigh Valley
has been able to do: bridge the politics between all HIV providers.”
Moravian College is a private, coeducational, selective liberal arts college located
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Tracing its founding to 1742, it is recognized as America's
sixth-oldest college. Visit the web site at www.moravian.edu.
