HIV testing should become the norm in primary care facilities – Yaroslava Lopatina

It is crucial that HIV testing becomes standard practice in primary health care facilities.

Yaroslava Lopatina, head of the U.S. AIDS Healthcare Foundation office in Ukraine, emphasized this during a press conference at the Media Center Ukraine.

“On the one hand, we work with health care facilities that provide direct care to people with HIV, as well as those that do not, because they have a different profile. For example, primary care physicians. This is where we see a significant area for improvement. To be honest, our current experience isn’t very positive. Yes, they reach out, they are willing to accept tests from us, but often those tests just sit there unused. So it’s not an easy task to make HIV testing a routine part of primary care,” she said.

According to Lopatina, physicians must actively offer HIV testing to make it the norm, without judgment or stigma.

“There needs to be a proactive step from the health system to the patient or client. Our ideal scenario is one where a primary care physician can either identify behavioral risk factors and suggest an HIV test, or identify symptoms that may indicate HIV infection, rather than waiting for a person to request an HIV test themselves. Physicians need to actively suggest HIV testing and normalize it to the same extent as testing for hemoglobin or blood sugar. HIV testing should become routine, without judgment or stigma,” Lopatina stressed. 

Read more: https://mediacenter.org.ua/news