It is likely that foreign healthcare workers applying to work for the UK’s National Health Service will be asked to test for HIV, according to reports in UK newspapers today.
The mandatory test for applicants is likely to be introduced after reports in the UK media that as many as 737 HIV-positive nurses were recruited from overseas by the NHS last year. Approximately 2,700 nurses were recruited from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana last year, countries where adult HIV infection rates have reached 20% in some areas.
At the moment there is no requirement on healthcare workers in the UK to test for HIV and no patient has ever been infected by HIV in the UK by a doctor, nurse or other health worker. It is not yet known if an overseas applicant testing positive for HIV would be banned from working for the NHS, and it is current practice for doctors, nurses or midwives testing positive for HIV (or hepatitis B and C) to remain in post but not to undertake invasive procedures. The testing requirement would be the first time since the 1980s that a major UK employer has insisted on HIV antibody testing as a condition of employment. The move has been condemned by the National AIDS Trust.
The NHS has become reliant on recruiting overseas staff, particularly from southern Africa, to fill vacancies, and concern about the recruitment of HIV-positive nurses prompted ministers at the Department of Health to establish an advisory committee on the testing of new overseas recruits last August.
A spokesperson for the NHS said: "Ministers have yet to make a decision on this…The recommendations are still being considered."
Last year, in a move designed to ease public fears about HIV-positive health care workers, the NHS announced that it would no longer be routinely contacting the patients of doctors, nurses or midwives found to be carrying HIV and that each case would be considered on an individual basis. Reports of HIV-positive doctors and nurses are usually accompanied by media hysteria, even though the risk to patients is very small and no health care worker has ever infected a patient with HIV in the UK.