Fifteen Fundamental Principles
An ad hoc HIV testing working group comprised of national and regional HIV advocacy organizations released a set of guiding principles to expand voluntary
HIV testing in healthcare settings. Released the week of National HIV Testing Day (June 27), the fifteen principles are intended to serve as a roadmap for efforts to expand the availability and acceptance of HIV screening while maintaining informed consent, counseling on the meaning and implications of test results, linkage to care, and respect for patient’s rights.The guiding principles and list of endorsing organizations will be used to educate decision-makers at the local, state, and federal levels of government. The document is also meant to guide HIV advocacy around HIV testing expansion.
Click here to read the principles, see a list of current endorsers, and to find out how your organization can endorse.
Endorsements are being taken until August 20, 2007.
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ReplyDeleteWhere is there any reference to getting tested TOGETHER or getting tested TOGETHER BEFORE having sex?... People need to get tested TOGETHER because one person's positive result for a sexually transmitted disease affects both sex partners or both potential sex partners. We need to include discussion of how things are passed back and forth between sex partners because they did not get tested TOGETHER !
ReplyDelete> 3. Everyone offered testing
ReplyDelete> must be educated about HIV
It will prevent some people from getting tested and that's clearly more important. Offer to educate, counsel, propagandize separately from testing for A VARIETY of sexually transmitted infections. Combining educating with testing results in people not getting tested who otherwise would get tested.
"WHERE'S THERE ANY REFERENCE TO GETTING TESTED TOGETHER"
ReplyDeleteThe document doesn't discourage testing together ... In fact, it doesn't get into specific modalities at all but argues that many ways can and should be pursued to exand testing and that many types of actors--including community folks--should inform how, where, and with what emphasis testing is expanded. This comment misses the point that too many decisions about how testing can and should occur are happening without scarcely any input from real consumers of testing services. This must change or services will be ill prepared to meet real needs. Not that the comment is not a valid point, it just is at a level of detail far beyond the purpose of these GUIDING PRINICPLES.