Point-of-care testing for HIV in an Irish prison setting: results from three major Irish prisons

Abstract

HIV is more prevalent in the prison population compared to the general population. Prison inmates are at an increased risk of blood-borne infections. Considerable stigma has been documented amongst inmates with HIV infection. In collaboration with the schools, healthcare facilities, prison authorities and inmate Irish Red Cross groups in Wheatfield, Cloverhill and Mountjoy prisons in Dublin, Ireland, the Department of Genito Urinary Medicine and Infectious Diseases at St James' Hospital in Dublin developed a campaign for raising awareness of HIV, educating inmates about HIV and tackling HIV stigma. Following this campaign, large-scale point-of-care testing for HIV was offered over a short period. In total, 741 inmates were screened for HIV. One inmate tested positive for HIV. We experienced a large number of invalid test results, requiring formal laboratory serum testing, and a small number of false positive results. Large-scale point-of-care testing in the Irish prison setting is acceptable and achievable.

HIV testing strategies employed in health care settings in the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA): evidence from a systematic review

“…The searches yielded 15 004 records after de‐duplication; after full‐text review, 368 studies were included in the overall systematic review (Figure ). Of the 368 studies, 130 are described in this paper, exploring interventions and feasibility of HIV testing in health care settings in Europe, including 84 peer‐reviewed articles and 46 conference proceedings (Table ) .…”

“…Other than interventions where testing was provided, there were 23 studies using other interventions directed to patients. The majority of these interventions were campaigns that promoted local testing using social media, posters, digital media and websites , campaigns to promote National HIV Testing Week and other regional campaigns to promote testing . National HIV Testing Week increased testing from 4–9% before to 8–28% during the week , and it also resulted in half of those having blood samples collected at a hospital being tested for HIV .…”

“…The quality of the peer-reviewed studies was variable; of the 84 articles, 70% were of high quality, 19 were of medium quality (23%) and six were of low quality (7%) ( Table S8). Risk of bias was low in 42 studies (50%), medium in 36 studies (43%) and high in six studies (7%) ( Table S8).…”

“…Novel HIV testing technologies were employed by 40 studies in a wide range of clinical settings to increase testing coverage; the majority utilized rapid testing (n = 36) [18,19,22,24,25,34,36,45,46,[48][49][50]56,57,59,65,75,77,81,83,85,88,89,[99][100][101]107,113,117,129,132,134,137,139,141] while four utilized self-sampling (n = 3) [44,52,102] and self-testing strategies (n = 1) [108]. Two of the four self-sampling studies used oral fluid sampling while the self-test required a blood sample.…”

Mortality in Prisons: The Experience of the Bureau of Legal Medicine of Milan (Italy) (1993–2017)

“…3 According to the available literature, the health status of prisoners is conditioned 4 by factors intrinsic to the reality of imprisonment 5 and characterised by a high incidence of chronic diseases. 6 In fact, in this population, mental illnesses, 7 infectious diseases 8 –9 and addictions to illicit substances 10 are more common when compared to the general population. Health problems in the prison population, linked to an increased mortality, represent a public health priority.…”