Our webinar on Trends and Developments in HIV Testing is now available to watch.
Following this year’s National HIV Testing Week, we hosted a webinar on the latest HIV testing data and an update on emergency department opt-out BBV testing. We were joined by expert speakers Dr Alison Brown, Interim Head of HIV Surveillance at the UK Health Security Agency, and Steve Hindle, Project Manager for opt-out HIV testing at NHS England.
Attendees had the opportunity to learn about the latest HIV testing data and progress made in emergency department opt-out HIV testing, with a chance to ask presenters questions.
National HIV Testing Week starts Monday 6 February 2023 so please prepare by familiarising yourself with this year’s campaign and the different ways you can get involved.
A new campaign for 2023
National HIV Testing Week is a campaign to promote regular testing among the most-affected population groups in England. Regular testing helps to reduce the number of people living with undiagnosed HIV and those diagnosed late.
This year, the campaign returns with a new strapline, ‘I Test.’, across all National HIV Testing Week materials, replacing ‘Give HIV The Finger’, which has been in place for the previous five years. The headline ‘I Test.’ is followed by a line that explores people’s different reasons for testing. This allows for flexibility in responding to different audience needs.
The new strapline and campaign approach was developed and adopted following findings and recommendations from evaluations of ‘Give HIV The Finger’ and audience insights gathered over the summer of 2022. Audiences were involved through focus groups and surveys throughout the development process. It builds on the concept of the National HIV Prevention Programme’s umbrella campaign, ‘It Starts With Me‘ by positioning testing as something normal, desirable, and that we can all take personal responsibility for.
Please see sample images from the campaign below. The campaign features a wide range of models with some resources translated into a number of languages. You can see the whole range of campaign resources via HIV Prevention England’s resources portal.
How to get involved
There are many ways you can get involved and support National HIV Testing Week. We are inviting organisations to participate by running campaign events, providing testing opportunities and promoting HIV testing, and prevention awareness, with our support. For more details, please download the campaign briefing [PDF].
Free Resources
Free resources to promote HIV testing this National HIV Testing Week are now available to order.
Log in to order leaflets, posters, and merchandise to support your National HIV Testing Week activities.
All printed resources are also available to download as PDFs.
The use of antibiotics to prevent (rather than treat) sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is not endorsed by the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH) or the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). However, this self-management approach to sexual health has been used informally for some time, especially by some gay and bisexual men.
There is currently a renewed interest in better understanding if antibiotics can and should be used in this way – and what the potential drawbacks to this approach might be – in an era of declining condom use, HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and rising rates of bacterial STIs.
This briefing paper, produced by NAM aidsmap for HIV Prevention England, provides an overview of the latest research on STI prophylaxis. This technical briefing is based on research that has been carried out with cisgender men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women. There is a lack of research in this area with other groups.
The HPE team would like to acknowledge Krishen Samuel for producing this resource.
