We like to be comprehensive at Saving Lives, so, following our coverage yesterday of the great routine testing programme being rolled out at Chelsea & Westminster Hospitals, here’s another encouraging story from Manchester: “Patients being admitted to Manchester Royal Infirmary are being routinely offered HIV screening as part of a new policy to boost detection rates. It means any adult admitted to the medical assessment unit – about 1,000 people every month – will be asked if they are happy to have the test.”
Manchester Royal are explicitly looking to increase detection rights with so wide a programme of HIV testing, and we applaud both the sentiment and the application. Indeed, Darren Cousins, a Specialist Registrar at the hospital, puts it as well as we could ourselves: “By making the test as normal as possible alongside other medical investigations, what we’re trying to do is reduce the stigma overall,” he said.
For information on how your hospital might begin to normalise and promote HIV testing, head to our NHS Campaigns page …
