Six hospitals to offer routine HIV testing

Patients are to be offered routine HIV testing in six A&Es in London.

The Barts Health Trust scheme follows the success of a pilot at the Royal London earlier this year where A&E patients were offered screening.

Doctors treated eight people who did not realise they were positive as a result of the trial in March and April.

Two of them had very high levels of HIV in the body —making them highly infectious to sexual partners and unborn children. Five others were no longer accessing treatment despite being previously tested HIV positive.

A total of 30 per cent of people who went to A&E during the pilot agreed to take a test — a total of 2,828 out of 9,297.

Next month Barts Health Trust also aims to get 2,500 outpatients tested across all departments at its six hospitals as part of HIV Testing Week in Europe.

Barts is Britain’s biggest health trust. Its hospitals — St Bartholomew’s, The Royal London, The London Chest Hospital, Newham University Hospital, Mile End Hospital and Whipps Cross University Hospital — cover 2.5 million patients and this is the first time such a large-scale programme has been offered in the NHS.

Rachel Bath, the HIV specialist nurse who ran the Royal London trial, said: “The pilot work has shown that opt-out testing is highly effective at shifting late HIV detection to early detection.

“The project also made our non-sexual health clinicians more aware of HIV and facilitated retraining on the need to test.”

The Royal London’s patient population includes Tower Hamlets which has a disproportionately higher risk of HIV than other areas of the UK. HIV prevalence in Tower Hamlets is three times the threshold at which routine screening is recommended in the UK and 16 per cent of new diagnoses present with advanced disease.

These figures are similar in Newham and Hackney. Earlier HIV diagnosis increases life expectancy and reduces the risk of passing on HIV infection to others. Barts Health Trust will introduce testing as routine once they have secured funding.