We are delighted that Doctor Matthew Page, Clinical Research Fellow at Birmingham Heartlands HIV service and University of Birmingham, won the Best Sexual Health Oral Presentation award at the 4th joint BHIVA/BASHH conference in Edinburgh this week.
Collaborating with our charity and medics and scientists from PHE Labs Birmingham, the Institute or Applied Health Research at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham Heartlands HIV Service and Wirral Integrated Sexual Health service, Dr Page presented a real-world evaluation of the Saving Lives Postal Testing Systems, comparing our mini tube kits and dried blood spot kits.
You can view his presentation here, in which Dr Page explained how all services should look at their own “RRR” – or Request to Result Ratios – as a truer reflection of actual costs in postal self-sampling, and what unexpected consequences this may have in terms of potential manpower utilisation and the patient experience.
Matt said, “I am proud to have been a part of the conference and honoured by the award.
“It’s great to work with a charity that really values high-quality research, and patient care. They have developed a fantastic postal testing system: the beauty is in its simplicity , but you would not believe the science, technology, testing and evaluation that sits behind it!”
BHIVA DBS Saving Lives Postal Testing Systems Flyer Dan Hartland, Director of Operations for the charity, said: “We are delighted for Matt and all of our collaborators. Our postal testing system has been over three years in the making and it’s great to see its potential starting to be fully realised. We have always been quality- and research-driven, and are really keen to critically evaluate our systems and work with sevice providers to understand and their own data.”
Dr Sowsan Atabani, Consultant Virologist at PHE Birmingham, added: “It’s been a huge amount of work to validate our laboratories Dried Blood Spot analysis for HIV, Syphilis and Hepatitis B and C to CPU standards, and it’s so great to see this working well in the community.”
For more information, you can download our flyer here.
