New employees of Britain's National Health Service [NHS] will undergo compulsory HIV testing if their jobs involve close contact with patients, the NHS has announced.
The measure was recommended by a government medical panel studying the potential risk to patients from workers infected with serious communicable diseases. The panel's report says the policy is “not intended to prevent those infected with bloodborne viruses from working in the NHS, but to restrict them from working in those clinical areas [surgery, dentistry, midwifery and gynecology] where their infection may pose a risk to patients in their care.”
Existing NHS staff seeking to transfer into these areas from other departments must also undergo testing, as must staff returning to work after a career break or overseas employment.
All new NHS recruits were already being screened for tuberculosis and hepatitis, and the move to add HIV to the list came amid growing public anxiety. In December, 125 patients in southwest England were offered HIV tests after a worker was found to have contracted the virus. The Dorset and Somerset Health Authority, which refused to identify the employee, announced that none of the patients who had opted for testing had been infected. While there have been no known cases in the UK of patients being infected with HIV by a health care worker, there have been 22 alerts affecting approximately 8000 patients.
Officials emphasized that the testing requirements were not aimed at the NHS's large number of foreign-born staff. In 2001, the NHS recruited more than 2000 nurses in South Africa, where the HIV infection rate is among the highest in the world. — Mary Helen Spooner, West Sussex, UK