Get involved with European HIV-Hepatitis Testing Week

Helping to ensure more people become aware of their hepatitis and HIV status can only happen with the support of partners like you. 2015 marks the first year that testing week has included hepatitis and we hope that that this year will be as successful as the past two years. To ensure as many partners can participate as possible, testing week 2015 has the flexibility to focus on just HIV or HIV and hepatitis combined – a number of logo options have been developed to support you.

Please feel free to use any of the information and materials on this website to help more people to become aware of their HIV and hepatitis status.

How policy makers can make a difference

It is important that policy makers and government officials are aware of the benefits of HIV and hepatitis testing and the evidence to support these benefits. HIV and hepatitis testing programmes require government support and funding in order to achieve impact.

This website contains the European guidelines that support the need to increase access to and availability of voluntary, confidential and free HIV and hepatitis testing across Europe, alongside a dossier of evidence, which summarises the key data. These can be found in the evidence section of the website.

How healthcare professionals can make a difference

We encourage healthcare professionals to offer HIV and hepatitis tests whenever relevant. This includes healthcare professionals working in sexual health clinics, as well as those in general practice, emergency settings and in hospitals. As a healthcare professional, you may consider adopting screening for HIV and hepatitis as part of routine care in high prevalence settings. For HIV you can also use indicator condition guided HIV testing.

Information about indicator condition guided HIV testing can be found in the Why test section of the website.

How organisations can make a difference

There are a number of ways that your organisation can help to increase access to HIV and hepatitis testing. For example, you may want to carry out:

  • Advocacy initiatives for voluntary, confidential and free HIV and/or hepatitis testing
  • Awareness raising activities for key populations at higher risk
  • HIV/hepatitis testing outreach activities for key populations at higher risk
  • Capacity building initiatives (e.g. training of healthcare staff)
  • Policy meetings
  • Engagement with opinion makers and the media
  • Other activities that seek to reduce the barriers of HIV/hepatitis testing and fulfil the aims of the European HIV-Hepatitis Testing Week.

Resourcing your activities

HIV in Europe does not offer financial support to participating partners for testing week activities but does offer a range of template materials and ideas for how to get involved, as well as a platform for sharing experiences and a condensed compilation of the evidence and European guidelines on HIV and hepatitis testing. A fundraising toolkit has been developed for ideas on how to secure resources for your activities. These can be found in the testing week materials section of the website.

 

Inspiration for testing week activities

Visit the browse shared materials page for a range of examples of effective HIV and/ or hepatitis testing strategies and initiatives that you might want to consider implementing locally. They have been uploaded by HIV in Europe and other partners following an internal review process for relevance. We have also included ideas for testing activities in Toolkit 2 – testing week implementation handbook.

 

Tell others about your HIV and/or hepatitis testing initiatives

We would like to encourage partners to share their HIV and/or hepatitis testing initiatives so that the HIV and hepatitis communities can easily learn from others’ successes and challenges. These may be initiatives for testing week in previous years or from separate, past campaigns or activities that you have been involved in.

You may want to share materials such as scientific posters, abstracts and articles, project descriptions, evaluation reports and communications materials. When uploading scientific posters, abstracts and articles, please be aware of copyright issues.

You can upload your materials on the upload materials to share page.

If you haven’t got anything to upload yet we would still like to hear about what you are planning for testing week. We are active on Facebook and Twitter – visit our pages and tell us about your plans, share photos and tweet us to help build anticipation and excitement for future testing weeks.