NOAH’s Impact on HIV Prevention and Awareness

By Andrea E. Leuser, BSN, RN | NOAH Partners in Prevention Nurse Navigator

In September 2021, NOAH received a Partners in Prevention grant from the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) to increase awareness and prevention of HIV.

The objectives under this grant are:

• Increase the number of patients counseled and tested for HIV.
• Increase the number of patients prescribed pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).
• Increase the number of patients linked to HIV care and treatment within 30 days of diagnosis.

Since I started my role as NOAH’s Partners in Prevention Nurse Navigator at the beginning of the year, five patients have been diagnosed with HIV. Of those five patients, four of them report being heterosexual with no intravenous drug use. Of those five patients, three (60%) of them already had an AIDS diagnosis.

In today’s world with easily accessible HIV testing, advanced treatment, monies available to help with treatment, and CDC recommendations for testing, we should not be seeing 60% of new HIV diagnoses already advanced to AIDS.

How do we improve this? Two words: HIV testing. We need to be diligent about testing all patients for HIV. And when we have a patient that is HIV negative and sexually active, regardless of age, we need to be proactive about getting the patient on Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) which is covered by health insurance and 340-B for non-insured patients.

At NOAH, let’s support the global efforts for ending the HIV epidemic by recommending and providing an HIV test for all patients.

June 27 is National HIV testing day, no need to stop there. Have you been tested?

For more information about HIV Testing efforts, tune into NOAH’s Facebook Live Q&A Wednesday, June 22 at 1 p.m.