Baroness Barker
Main Page: Baroness Barker (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Baroness Barker (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for this opportunity to talk about a project that I think signals a way forward for our whole society. When the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic comes to be written, faith organisations will appear both in the credit column and the debit one. Across the world it is a great shame that some faith organisations have prevented people from seeking treatment and prevention. Equally, across the world there are millions of people who would not be cared for were it not for faith-based organisations.
The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said quite rightly that 13% of the United Kingdom population is from black, Asian and minority-ethnic communities but those same populations make up 47% of people diagnosed with HIV in the United Kingdom. Black, Asian and minority-ethnic faith-based organisations have a unique opportunity to get to those communities and work with them. However, there are a number of different barriers, not least the stigma and some of the teachings of some of those churches about the modes of transmission, such as sexual behaviour and intravenous drug use.
The NAZ black and minority-ethnic HIV/AIDS project has a wonderful programme, a very small one, called Testing Faith. This has worked with community leaders to find out what some of the main barriers are: denial that HIV infects communities of faith, lack of knowledge about the epidemiology, lack of knowledge about HIV and sexual health prevention interventions, and lack of knowledge about the benefits of HIV treatment. NAZ has put together a small two-day training programme for faith leaders to build their capacity to work with their communities. It has three objectives: first, to enable the leaders to draw up sexual health plans for their communities; secondly, to enable them to deliver point-of-care HIV testing and counselling within their communities for the people for whom it is right; and thirdly, to allow the leaders to refer people to GUM clinics.
The programme worked with a significant number of leaders from Christian faith groups and leaders from the Muslim community. The majority of people who went through the complete training were from the Christian communities, but there were some from the Muslim communities too and they deserve enormous credit for that. NAZ found that those community leaders needed help in understanding some of the basic information about the way things work and about how to raise the issue within their communities in ways that were appropriate. They managed to do that and as a result throughout 2014 there were 770 testing sessions. These are particularly important among black and minority-ethnic communities which, by comparison, present late and at a much more advanced state of the illness and consequently have far worse health outcomes. The work was concentrated around London, where the majority of these faith communities are, and in their particular boroughs, but they also managed to get out into other parts of the country. I am not quite sure of the exact outcome of the 770 tests because a number of individuals went to clinics and therefore their testing was anonymous.
It has been a very interesting project. It has had a profound effect on people from those communities who are HIV positive. It has also had a profound effect on some of the faith leaders themselves. It is a very good programme, saving the National Health Service money. One might expect that it gets funding from the NHS. It does not. It works with faith communities, so one might expect that it gets funding from faith communities. It does not. It is kept going by the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
This is one of those areas in which our mainstream institutions fail to understand the very real battles that people from minority communities, particularly minority communities of faith, have to contend with. They are, in health terms, communities that are much more vulnerable to risk than the rest of us. It would be excellent if, as a result of this debate, some appreciation and not least some funding could go towards the NAZ project and this particularly effective programme.