Prisoners: HIV Infection
(asked on )
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the (a) availability, (b) quality and (c) effectiveness of HIV testing and treatment in prisons.
HIV testing is available in all prisons in England through healthcare services commissioned by NHS England, through both primary care and genitourinary medicine services. Additionally, all adult prisons in England will provide HIV testing through an ‘opt-out’ testing programme at or near reception by the end of the current financial year as part of a wider blood-borne virus opt-out testing programme being delivered in partnership between Public Health England, NHS England and Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.
The quality of services is assessed by NHS England on a quarterly basis through the collection of data via the Health and Justice Indicators of Performance (HJIPs), which includes information on the number of people offered HIV tests, those tested and the number of people newly diagnosed with HIV referred for treatment within two weeks of diagnosis.
For quarter one of financial year 2017/18, 10,574 prisoners were tested for HIV, and 197 cases of HIV were diagnosed in this cohort. Of those, 39 were seen by specialist service providers within two weeks of diagnosis. Further information is available here: