Last chance for Manchester Run places!

posted: 26/04/2011

George House Trust still has a few places left in Team GHT in this year’s Great Manchester Run.
We have a great support package available, including a free GHT running vest, after run massage and a post run party at Taurus.

Please email: laura@ght.org.uk as soon as possible if you would like to snap up one of our final places.

Hospital Complaints and North Manchester

posted: 21/04/2011

Channel 4 TV’s Dispatches programme last week reported long waits and poor care of some people using North Manchester General Hospital’s Accident & Emergency and the associated Medical Assessment wards.

The TV undercover investigation did not  look into HIV treatment and care at the hospital, which is a regional centre of HIV care excellence.

The Care Quality Commission has now been asked to investigate the problems in Accident and Emergency and Medical Assessment Unit care. The local NHS watchdog, Manchester LINks say “We would encourage the public to contact their local LINks at any time if they have a concern or to report such instances as seen on the Channel 4 programme last night without delay. Your local LINks will be able to investigate with the help of the Care Quality Commission and local Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committees. Your identity will always be protected and all information you provide treated confidentially when going through LINks.”

If you have any experiences you would like to tell Manchester LINks about regarding North Manchester General Hospital or any other Manchester Hospital, please contact Danny on 0161 874 2189 or email him.

Making complaints about the NHS, other hospitals and local social care
Each district has its own NHS LINk watchdog – Find your local LINk here

Manchester LINk
BHA, Democracy House
609/609A Stretford Road
Old Trafford, Manchester
M16 0QA
 

Contact the Manchester LINk team 
Anthony Doggett - LINk Administrator 0161 874 2187
Naheed Akhtar - LINk Manager 0161 874 2188; Mobile:07855 233 462
Danny Gough - Community Engagement Officer 0161 874 2189
Valeska Matziol - Community Engagement Officer 0161 874 2190
Lydia Hurford Cato - Community Engagement Officer 0161 874 2191
email: manchesterlink@theBHA.org.uk
 

Speak at Positive Prevention Conference?

posted: 12/04/2011

George House Trust, the Manchester based HIV support organisation, runs a Positive Prevention project, funded by the Elton John AIDS Foundation. We are holding a free national conference in Manchester on 1st July for staff and organisations doing positive prevention work, to share best practice, and to consider developing minimum standards for Positive Prevention work.

Speakers Wanted

We are inviting people who would like to speak at this conference about their experience in Positive Prevention work to contact us.

Positive Prevention means working to support people living with HIV, where one of the benefits is reducing onward HIV transmission. Positive Prevention at George House Trust includes

• one to one support
• group "peer support" spaces
• courses for people newly diagnosed with HIV and
• reflective residential weekends for people diagnosed with HIV for longer than 12 months.

Most of our weekends and courses have been for gay and bi men, and we have run others for people living with HIV.

Call for speakers
If you

• Are working in an organisation doing ‘positive prevention’ work with people living with HIV, or
• Want to share the positive prevention work you are doing, or
• Have any data from positive prevention work which shows changes in behaviour or knowledge (we want the conference to hear evidence both of what works, and what doesn’t seem to work), or
• Want to highlight aspects of positive prevention work, or
• Are a person with HIV who has taken part in a Positive Prevention project, or
• Want to suggest a speaker with relevant knowledge or experience of Positive Prevention
  we want to hear from you.
   

Presentations can be in any format and would be for the whole conference, of about 35 people.

Please Contact Chris

If you are interested in making a presentation, please email Chris Morley with your proposal by Monday 23rd May .

Interested in attending?
This conference is only for people and organisations already doing Positive Prevention. If you would like to come as a delegate to the Positive Prevention conference, please contact Chris.  
 

What some people with HIV have said about our residential weekends

• The weekend really helped me to identify where I am now - and to look clearly at what I need for the future
• I learned so much from the other men and really now feel focussed on making positive changes
• It helped me connect, and gave me support and direction
• The weekend has given me a real boost and I feel now like I can face some of my issues in a constructive way and really move forward
• Thanks for a great weekend which has helped me think about how I deal with some of my fears and anxieties about living with HIV
• The weekend gave me a sense of space and safety to be able to talk more confidently about living with HIV now and in the future.

Messaging Gay Men About STIs

posted: 07/04/2011

Manchester gay and bi men using the Royal Infirmary's Hathersage Clinic (along with men using STI clinics in Sheffield, Brighton and at four London STI clinics) now have a new way to warn partners they may have been in contact with a sexually transmitted infection.

The Sexual Health Messaging Service has just begun, launched by GMFA, the gay men’s health charity, and is linked in with the popular gay profile sites Fitlads, Gaydar, Manhunt and Recon, and the cruising app Bender.

Men need to Opt-in for notifications  if they get an invitation, for it to work.

It's funded by the Elton John AIDS Foundation and aims to help cut the number of men with undiagnosed STIs, including HIV. Men who are diagnosed with an STI can tell previous sexual partners by using an online system (anonymously if prefered), so the partners can go and get tested and, if necessary, treated.
 

99% want to know about any STIs

Over a quarter of gay men with HIV do not know they have HIV. GMFA’s study shows that the vast majority of gay men (99.3%) want to be told if any sexual partner gets an STI and 97.5% want to be told if this is HIV.
 

Matthew Hodson of GMFA, commented: “Many STIs don’t show any symptoms, so lots of men may be infected and not know it. While it’s best to tell men you’ve had sex with if you find out you’ve picked up an STI, making that awkward phone call or sending an email can be difficult. As a result, some men choose not to tell, even though they know they should. We’ve made the process as easy as possible by doing most of the work for you – all you need is a contact for your partners and we’ll take care of the rest.”
 

An easy (even anonymous) way to tell

Existing ways of telling partners often require anyone who is diagnosed with an STI to contact their partners direct, sometimes using a pink slip issued by the clinic. GMFA’s research shows these systems often don’t work.

For all kinds of reasons some men can't or won't notify sexual partners. Of the men who do tell partners about having an STI or HIV, only 65% told all their partners. Here's some of the difficulties and reasons for this

• not having partners’ contact details (sometimes only a first name, or only a profile name)
• embarrassment
• not wanting the partner to know about their having an STI or HIV 
• not wanting to see the guy again.

Now men using the Hathersage in Manchester, men in Brighton, Sheffield and parts of London can use GMFA’s new Sexual Health Messaging Service. It  will then be spread across the rest of London later this year and then the rest of the country next year. 

The GMFA service means clinics give men a unique reference number so they can log in to the online system and send notifications using a number of contact methods, including

• website profile name
• cruising app profile name
• mobile 
• email.

The message is automatically written and contains links to where their partners can go for testing. While men are encouraged to say who they are, it can be kept anonymous.

The service started its six-month pilot on Monday. The clinics taking part are

• In Manchester, the Hathersage Centre (Upper Brook Street / Hathersage Road corner) 
• In Sheffield, the Royal Hallamshire Hospital
• Brighton, Claude Nicol Centre at Royal Sussex County Hospital
• 56 Dean Street, Soho, London,
• Homerton University Hospital, London
• The Lloyd Clinic at Guy’s Hospital, London
• St Bartholemew’s Hospital, London 

Men can use the service to send messages to partners met through the four participating gay dating websites (Fitlads, Gaydar, Manhunt and Recon) and the cruising app, Bender.

Opt-in to take part 

Profile site members need to opt-in to receive notifications if and when they are sent an invite.
 

Matthew of GMFA tells us: “This is a major project and marks a huge shift in the way men can notify their partners about STIs they’ve picked up. By making the process easy, we hope to make more men aware of any STIs they may have and ultimately reduce the number of STI infections in the community.”

Talking and Telling about HIV

posted: 28/02/2011

There’s a lot of fuss made about how important it is for gay and bi men diagnosed with HIV to tell their sexual partners about HIV, before any sex takes place – which is known as ‘disclosure’.

Telling people whether or not you have an STI / HIV is your choice.

We think it is smarter if every  person in the UK were to talk about HIV and discuss their and partners’ HIV and STI status and risks before sex. But telling others about having HIV is always a choice.

One-sided talking

One major problem is that undiagnosed people, including gay and bi men, rarely ever talk about their own HIV status, but instead expect diagnosed people to always reveal their HIV status.

Some undiagnosed men then decide not to have sex, or decide on less risky sex after the partner says they have HIV.

Conference debates

George House Trust has critically examined the evidence for and against relying on being told HIV status as a way of avoiding getting HIV. Chris Morley, George House Trust's HIV policy expert, issued a challenge to gay men's HIV prevention workers when he gave a detailed presentation at the CHAPS conference last week for England's sexual health and HIV prevention organisations.

The challenge is to tell undiagnosed men that relying on being told by people with HIV is a seriously flawed way to try to avoid HIV. The HIV risk run by men expecting disclosure is simply too high. The challenge was also to help undiagnosed men be more respectful to anyone who does disclose having HIV. Some disclosing men with HIV are then shamed, abused, rejected, or worse.

Talking about HIV happens very unevenly and the expectations of disclosure put an unbalanced burden on people with HIV.

Dysfunctional Disclosure

The far bigger problem however, is that relying on being told, and being told accurately, is a highly risky way to manage anyone's HIV risks.

Only men diagnosed with HIV have HIV status information that is at all reliable.

Depending on men to tell you they have HIV puts you at a big HIV risk. Disclosure doesn't work at all well as a way of staying HIV negative. 

• 1 in 3 gay and bi men have never had a HIV tested - so untested, can't tell anyone anything useful about their own HIV status
• Men who have been tested usually only have information that is past its sell-by date
• Many men have had condomless anal sex since they had their last negative HIV test. An MOT certificate saying your car was roadworthy is no guarantee of future safety after you have had a crash. In the same way, a negative HIV test result becomes worthless once you have had unprotected sex.
• The only dependable information is from men who have been diagnosed with HIV to tell you this; but not all diagnosed men disclose in all situations; for example disclosure by diagnosed HIV+ men is less common in gay saunas and clubs.

George House Trust is also making a second presentation, about cuts in legal advice and representation for people with HIV. 

HIV Legal Advice Services
Among the hundreds of cuts, one cut would remove most legal aid for advice and representation at courts and tribunals. £450 million is to be slashed from budgets for advice, such as provided by Citizens Advice, Manchester Advice, Law Centres and other organisations, for immigration and asylum, welfare benefits, housing, employment and most discrimination cases.
 

This will affect millions of people a year, and you can tell things will become really bad, because even the Judges’ Council has gone public with its objections.

HIV Talking and Telling - George House Trust discussion for CHAPS-14 conference, Manchester  

HIV Advice Services - George House Trust discussion for CHAPS-14 Conference, Manchester

CHAPS-14 Conference, Manchester, March 9-11th

Image - Let's Talk HIV - Swedish language HIV site