HIV and Immigration Conference

posted: 28/10/2010

George House Trust invites professionals to our 26 November conference on Working with HIV positive people subject to immigration controls. This is on Friday 26th November 9.30am - 4.30pm at George House Trust, Manchester.
 

The frequent changes to asylum legislation and policy make it difficult to keep on top of the issues and offer your clients the best advice or most effective practice.
 

Living with HIV adds a further layer of complexity to immigration and asylum applications and appeals. Those living inside the immigration and asylum system are confronted with issues such as poor housing, poverty, alienation and fear.
 

Creative Solutions

The aim of this day is to

• demystify terminology and systems 
• to equip workers with a working understanding of the systems and legislation
• share approaches that effectively support this client group
• suggest creative solutions for professionals to adopt.
   

Speakers include:

• Ruth Heatley, Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit - The Asylum Process; Application and Support Systems
• Daniel Murphy – George House Trust Service and Development Manager - HIV and Immigration, including Migrants' Rights to HIV Treatment
• Boaz Trust - Destitution Realities and Support
• Refugee Action - Leave to Remain and Legacy. Life after Asylum

Conference Programme

Cost and Bookings

£40 for Voluntary Sector agencies, £60 for Statutory Sector. If you would like to come but are unable to pay please contact us

To book a place on this course please contact Nathan Perry 0161 274 4499

For more information or specific access / disability requirements contact Daniel Murphy 0161 274 4499
We are 5 -10 minutes walk from Manchester Piccadilly station Map

More HIV Testing Urged

posted: 08/10/2010

The NHS health advice body NICE has produced its first HIV guidance, about HIV testing. The draft HIV testing guidance recommends that mainstream health services offer much more HIV testing to the two communities most affected by HIV in England, black African people and to men who have sex with men. The guidelines also call for more testing to be offered in places such as bars and saunas, using rapid point-of-care tests.
 

NICE HIV testing: open for comments
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) tells the NHS which are the best and most cost-effective treatments and public health interventions. NHS bodies are legally required to fund the medicines and treatments recommended by NICE.
 

Making HIV testing guidelines work
Other organisations have produced HIV testing guidelines before, notably the British HIV Association (BHIVA) and the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV (BASHH). But these were not backed by the UK National Screening Committee, nor by NICE, and many parts of the NHS simply ignored them.

The most recent BHIVA and BASHH testing guidelines recommended that HIV testing should be offered in a wide range of healthcare settings, including GP surgeries and most hospital departments. Little was done about this.
 

NICE will force more testing action
To increase testing, the Department of Health asked NICE to produce public health guidance to increase HIV testing both among men who have sex with men and among black African communities. The new NICE guidance supports most of the BHIVA and BASHH testing recommendations, and goes further with some recommendations.
 

There are two guidelines - one to increase testing in men who ave sex with men, and a the other for increasing testing among black African people.
 

Local strategies needed

For both men who have sex with men and for black Africans in England, NICE recommends preparing local strategies to increase HIV testing, developed in consultation with community organisations and the people affected. These strategies should focus on sections of the community who are less likely to use services. Community engagement and involvement is particularly important for black African communities.
 

Africans - involve people as champions and leaders
NICE recommends that black Africans in England should be recruited and trained to act as ‘health champions’ and ‘role models’. HIV testing work must deal with people’s misunderstandings and ignorance about HIV, testing and treatment, and must promote the benefits of early diagnosis and tackle HIV-related stigma.
 

The guidance for black African communities includes providing HIV testing outside sexual health clinics. This is because the evidence from the literature is that HIV testing in sexual health clinics is seen by some black Africans as stigmatising, complicated and time-consuming, while HIV testing in other healthcare settings was welcomed.
 

NICE recommends that general practitioners should routinely offer an HIV test to black Africans who have not tested before or who have had a new sexual partner since the last negative test. In hospitals and other healthcare settings, an opt-out test should be routinely provided to black Africans who are having blood taken for other reasons.
 

Testing in sex venues to reach gay men
Health promotion interventions promoting testing to men who have sex with men should include venues, such as saunas, clubs and cruising areas, or websites, which facilitate sex between men.
NICE appears more enthusiastic than BHIVA about community testing in sex on the premises venues. In gay venues, NICE says rapid tests (using mouth swabs or finger-prick blood samples) should be provided by trained staff, in a secluded or private area.
 

NICE’s guidance for men who have sex with men encourages testing in primary care (GPs), but not in secondary care (hospitals). The BHIVA guidelines are different, and recommend that all healthcare settings should offer an HIV test to any man who says he has sex with other men.
 

NICE recommends that GP surgeries should recommend all males to have HIV tests where the surgery is in an area with a large gay community or theer is a high rate of HIV.
 

Carl Burnell, of the gay men’s health charity GMFA, questions whether this will is work, because of the many other demands on GP surgery capacity. “The strategy assumes that other services are running like clockwork and have capacity to offer HIV testing,” he said.
 

Clear path from testing to services
All testing services need clear pathways for people to obtain any necessary confirmation of the HIV test result, HIV treatment services and HIV support groups. People who test negative may need help through counselling and safer sex interventions.
 

The draft guidance comes before results are published on several Department of Health funded pilot projects evaluating new testing strategies.
 

NICE’s guidance is open for feedback and comments until late November. The final NICE HIV testing guidance will appear in March 2011.

HIV testing guidelines for MSM 

HIV testing guidleines for black Africans in England
 

Source

Happy couple raise funds for GHT!

posted: 24/08/2010

A huge thank you to Mike and Andrew Page Fielding who celebrated tying the knot by raising nearly £200 for George House Trust! Mike and Andrew asked guests at their Civil Partnership to make a donation to support our work.

George House Trust is the largest provider of HIV social care in the North West of England. We support over 2000 people living with HIV. Your support makes a lot of difference to the people we work with. We're a small charity. No amount of money raised is every too small. Every penny counts!

If you are interested in raising money for us, please get in touch by emailing fundraising@ght.org.uk and we will work with you to turn your idea into action!
 

The Future of Immigration Legal Help

posted: 05/08/2010

Face the Facts on Radio 4 explores the tough problems effective community immigration and asylum advice organisations are facing from the government. Free immigration and asylum legal help is under threat from government policy and practice. The programme includes Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit who do so much to help many people living with HIV.

Immigration advice in crisis

An asylum seeker takes his own life after his lawyers go into administration; a man and his family are thrown into detention because they've unwittingly been given false papers by an unscrupulous immigration adviser; a woman who's fled torture but hasn't been able to see her children for years because of bungling lawyers.

Their experiences cost them money and heartache. But poor legal advice can cost all of us in the long run if wrongly advised clients end up appealing their decision, or people, who've been told incorrectly that they can stay, then have to be removed from the country at the taxpayers' expense.
 

Government cuts and changes imperil lives

Changes to the way legal aid is paid have made the system "unsustainable". Asylum lawyers can now wait years for legal aid payments to be settled.

John Waite talks to some of the hundreds of committed advisers who have been forced out of their jobs because they either can't make it pay - or can't do the job properly any more. And he asks the Legal Services Commission to justify a false economy and a failure of justice.

Listen Again

This Face the Facts programe (half an hour long) was broadcast this lunchtime (Thu 5 August) but it is repeated on Sunday 8 Aug at 9pm in the evening on BBC Radio 4

You can also Listen Now online

This article in the Guardian discusses the need for better decisions by the UK Borders Agency on asylum claims because poor intial decisions add to legal aid bills for appeals.

Help Save Immigration Aid Unit

posted: 09/07/2010

Vital legal help with immigration and asylum problems for people with HIV (and many other people) is threatened. The Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, which gives excellent help to people with HIV, is to have its funding from the government cut. Our leading regional Immigration Aid Unit will no longer be able to provide 70% of the help that it does now.
 

Immigration aid funding cuts

The Legal Services Commission told them at the end of June that their legal aid contract will be cut from October 2010. Last month another major excellent immigration aid unit in London, Refugee and Migrant Justice, (which also had offices in Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle and Nottingham), was forced to close down.
 

Save our Immigration Aid Unit
We can’t let this happen in Greater Manchester. The Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit (GMIAU) does exceptional work for people with HIV and immigration and asylum problems. We and they need you to help us fight this massive funding cut.
 

The GMIAU works with some of the most vulnerable people for whom the asylum system has already done an injustice. Daily they see people who have been unrepresented because they weren't able to get legal advice, or they got advice for their asylum claim but when it came to appeal their legal representative turned them away - because the work isn't 'profitable'.
See below for more details on what is happening – Statement from the Immigration Aid Unit
 

How they want you to help

This is what you can do

• Contact your local MP. You can use the 'contact your politician' green and yellow box on their website. Please do it now and when you get replies email or post copies of the replies to the Immigration Aid Unit .
  Point out to your MP what a valuable service they provide and how they rely on organisations, including GMIAU, to help their constituents. Without the GMIAU their advice surgery queues will get longer and their work will become much harder. Around 1,500 people with HIV in NW England (25% of all those living with HIV), most of whom live in Greater Manchester, are not British Citizens and many of them have complex asylum and immigration problems. Get your MP to pledge their support.
• email / write to the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor
  Rt.Hon.Kenneth Clarke QC MP
  Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor
  Ministry of Justice
  102 Petty France
  London
  SW1H OAL
  email Ken Clarke through this address
• Write to the Minister for Justice
  Damian Green MP
  Minister for Immigration
  Home Office
  2 Marsham Street
  London
  SW1 4DF
• please email a copy all replies please to Denise the director of the Immigration Aid Unit
• Ask your Trade Union or Professional Body to back the campaign.
  Skilled and experienced immigration caseworkers across the country are losing their jobs as a result of cuts to legal aid for more complex cases.
• Become a supporter of GMIAU.
  Support the work of GMIAU by getting friends and colleagues to sign up as a supporter and offering to do work for us (all assistance with legal action welcome), donate or fundraise.
  Email Denise to sign up.
   

More information on campaigning for Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit
For more information please email Denise McDowell, Director  or ring 0161-741 2646.
 

Statement from the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit
Statement about our position since the announcement of the outcome of the legal aid contracts for immigration.
 

This is the latest evidence of damage to the advice sector by the Legal Services Commission (LSC).

After three years of preparation, and several delays, the outcome of the national tendering round seems to have hinged upon whether an organisation ticked a box to say that they had applied for a level 3 caseworker to gain 1 point. This is so ludicrous as to be almost laughable. Except that of course it's not funny at all.
 

The LSC have damaged immigration legal aid beyond repair.
 

This will mean that people needing quality representation will be detrimentally affected. It will mean that there will be even more people standing unrepresented before the courts.
 

Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit remains committed to providing a high quality service to people affected by immigration control. Whilst the cut will affect the number of people we can see who are funded through legal aid we remain as committed as ever to the people we are here to serve - people affected by immigration control. Over the next few weeks and months we will be taking action to manage this situation including seeking to secure alternative funding to continue the work.
YOUR SUPPORT IS CRUCIAL.
THANK YOU