HIV Prevention Cuts?

posted: 27/11/2009

The health secretary, Andy Burnham should not even think of cutting £50m from public health budgets, including HIV prevention. These and other massive cuts are how he's planning to pay for his proposed free social care service. People affected, and the HIV and public health sectors, are noticing and concerned.
 

By suggesting that £50 million should be cut from health promotion work to fund his new social care programme, the health secretary is taking risks. There have been recent major public health emergencies, including the swine flu pandemic and E coli outbreaks. Meanwhile HIV diagnoses, chlamydia infections and adult obesity rates are all rising, and Scotland has one of the fastest growing rates of fatal liver disease in the world.
 

Sexual health cuts are a false economy
Cutting budgets on educating the public about sexually transmitted diseases might look popular. But chlamydia cases rose by 150% between 1997 and 2007, while the total number of people living with HIV in NW England rose by over 10% for yet another year.

About 1 in 4 of the 77,400 people living with HIV in the UK in 2007 don’t know they have HIV. Late HIV diagnosis is the worst in the country in NW England and this increases transmission – people diagnosed late are more infectious than people on successful treatment.
 

It is a false economy to cut spending on educating the public on how to avoid sexually transmitted infections and ignore the increasingly unhealthy lives people are living. Money spent on health promotion reduces the number of people in hospital or seeing their GPs, cutting waiting lists, illness rates and treatment. The NHS spends £750m on drugs treating avoidable lifestyle diseases. This could be a long-term saving to the country and its budgets.
 

Health promotion and health education may not be high in the public consciousness but need to be. The health impact of our high national alcohol consumption alone is worrying because of the damage it is doing to the nation's health – liver and sexual.
 

Providing free social care for the elderly is deliberately popular and an intended election vote winner, but preventive work for better public health is vitally important. It was one of the needs that led us to set up the NHS in the UK: to improve public health so that people would not become ill and need to go to hospital or see a doctor. Prevention is always better than cure – particularly with HIV, where there is no cure.

Health Secretary’s public health cut proposals
 

Source
 

image credit
 

Drug Company Money - No Thanks

posted: 16/10/2009

The debate about whether George House Trust should change its long-standing policy of not taking funding from drug companies ended with a very clear vote against this, from the Annual General Meeting last night. 85% of the voters at the Annual General Meeting rejected the proposal to consider accepting funding from the major drug companies.

There was a clear feeling that we should keep our moral stance and retain our principled opposition, so we are seen to be clearly independent of drug companies in our advice, information and other work. 

George House Trust will write a clear policy on refusing drug company funding and how this fits with our core values, and promote this in our publicity and to potential funders.

Elections and Accounts

Annual General Meetings are about elections and accounts too - so the accounts were accepted and the re-appointment of auditors was approved, and trustees were elected to serve on the board.

We would like to give our appreciation and thanks to Trustees who have stood down from the board: Jonathan Atkin, Agnes Kuzoraunye, Mervis Makhaza. 

Trustees for 2009-10

Reappointed, are trustees:

• Steven Ainscow
• Gerwyn Knight
• Deborah Mgijima
• Stewart Murau

New trustees:

• Paul Fairweather
• David Teasdale
• Jonathan Watts

Trustee Officers 

• Chair - Jim Vann,
• Treasurer - Colin Davies,
• Vice Chair - Damian Kelly

We have advertised for two external trustees and the outcome of this process will be announced at a later date.

Image credit from The Rag Blog

Council HIV Grant Threat

posted: 11/08/2009

Almost one in three councils would reduce their social care spending on people with HIV if the Department of Health (DH) removed ring-fencing from AIDS Support Grant, the National Aids Trust (NAT) has revealed. Ring-fencing is to make sure the money can only be spent on HIV. AIDS Support Grant pays for services such as counseling, peer support, staff training, support for carers and respite care and is a key part of the funding of HIV organisations. 

A quarter of councils did not know what they would do without the ring-fence restriction, while 35% said they would continue to provide the same funding. Shockingly 4 councils (4%) said they would no longer fund any HIV services. NAT's survey of Aids Support Grant (ASG) received responses from 106 out of the 150 councils that provide social services.

Voluntary sector funding fears

Only 8% of 30 voluntary sector organisations responding felt services would be funded at the same level if the grant was not protected, while half thought services would continue, but they would be cut.

Although the ring-fence is agreed until at least 2010/11, the NAT pointed out that there had been a “clear move away” from specific ring-fenced grants by government.

The ASG is worth £21.8m in 2009/10 and the DH said it would allocate a “similar amount” in 2010/11. In 2008/09 the size of the Grant given to local authorities ranged from £2,000 (rural Rutland in the East Midlands) to £860,000 (Lambeth in London).

Four out of five authorities were happy with the formula used to allocate the grant – 70% of which is based on the number of people living with HIV in an area, and 30% according to the number of women and children.

Additional costs to fund services for black Africans

However, one London borough said there were additional costs associated with providing services for black Africans because they were “hard to engage with”, and councils should receive more money if many people from these communities lived in their area.

Unspent grant

14% of councils had not spent all the grant, and one had not used the grant because it had no one to commission (buy) any services.

Where are the HIV Needs Assessments?

The NAT called for all authorities to carry out assessments of needs in their area before planning and commissioning social care services for those with HIV, after finding that almost half of the councils had no HIV Needs Assessment.
 

HIV social work jobs at risk

The report found almost three in five local authorities used the grant to fund HIV-specific social workers, but anecdotal evidence suggests these jobs were “disappearing as services are mainstreamed”.

Among other findings, the NAT found that:-

• 82% of authorities had evaluated services funded by the ASG
• 43% had a public monitoring, or a scrutiny process
• 24% were making direct payments to people living with HIV (direct payments allow people to buy the services they need from whoever they choose)
• 32% said the social care needs of people living with HIV were included in their Local Area Agreements
• 45% asked people with HIV to go through a fair access to care assessment (FACS), using standard eligibility criteria, while 55% used different eligibility thresholds to FACS for ASG-funded services
• In some cases where standard eligibility criteria were used for statutory services, voluntary sector services funded by the ASG were open to everyone with an HIV diagnosis

Could do better

The review found some things needing improvement. Half of the local authorities had not carried out any form of needs assessment before deciding how to use their grant. In addition, there is a need for more transparency and public accountability for how the Grant is spent.

AIDS Support Grant - making the difference - NAT's report

Source and NAT's press release