The Veterans Administration (VA) has a new HIV-testing policy mandating that HIV testing to be part of routine medical care. This will help ensure more veterans learn their status and help connect HIV-positive patients to care sooner, enabling them to live longer, healthier lives.
This new policy reminds providers that HIV testing should not be limited to only those veterans who have a demonstrable risk factor for HIV. The VA hopes these new policies (verbal informed consent and routine HIV testing) will help facilitate the timely diagnosis of HIV infection among our Veterans and support health care providers in their essential, life-saving work.
The routine testing model is proven to be effective in identifying infected persons, and a successful routine testing program already exists within the VA. In April 2008, the downtown, VA Los Angeles Ambulatory Care Clinic began offering rapid HIV testing to patients on a routine basis— and has since tested more than 450 patients.
The VA Los Angeles Ambulatory Care Clinic was the first VA site in the country to begin HIV rapid testing on a routine basis. It was also the first VA site to host a kick-off HIV rapid-testing event. This event had same-day HIV rapid testing, streamlined counseling, and nurse-initiated screening. They have all been proposed as remedies to increase screening in general medical and urgent care settings.
The success of routine testing programs lies largely with capability to organize a testing method that is easy to manage, patient-friendly and provides highly accurate results in a single visit— and rapid oral-fluid testing technology provides all of these, which helps make routine testing programs feasible in all VA facilities.
“Providing all Veterans with an opportunity to learn their HIV status is critical to curtailing the spread of this disease among this community and among the greater population as well,” said Dr. Henry Anaya, VA research scientist.
The accessibility of effective therapy has changed HIV into a treatable chronic disease, radically decreasing the death rate, and increasing those living with HIV.
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