Tags
da, doh, false negative, g-ocean rapid test, healthcare, healthcare workers, hillbrow clinic, hiv test, politics, the citizen, the star, window periodDA puts the DoH to the ‘test’
JournAIDS
29 July 2011
Going for an HIV test is daunting at the best of times without the added worry that the result might be a false negative. The Citizen and The Star newspapers have reported that a number of people tested for HIV at a Hillbrow clinic were told they had tested negative when they did in fact have HIV.
The Health Department’s scant explanation of the event should have set alarm bells ringing and sent journalists and other interested parties in search of alternative explanations for this lapse.
The Democratic Alliance’s (DA) Jack Bloom was the initial complainant in this case.
Bloom caught wind of the story and blamed the false negative results of the G-Ocean rapid test on the test itself, saying that the batch was faulty. The test in question has not been in use for very long.
The Health Department subsequently had the tests evaluated and found that they were in fact in good working order.
The articles go on to explain that the Department of Health has now fingered poorly trained healthcare workers as the glitch in the system. It is reported that the healthcare workers could not read the test results properly.
This conclusion raises serious questions around not only the medical training of healthcare workers but their ability to read and understand basic instructions.
This is because rapid tests for any number of infections and diseases all come in an easy to use standardised model which is very similar to a pregnancy test. The healthcare workers concerned should have quite a bit of experience with other rapid tests. It is therefore hard to believe that this was indeed the case.
The reason for this debacle might lie elsewhere. It could, for example, lie with other mistakes made in the HIV testing process.
HIV is undetectable in the blood for three to six months after infection; this is why even if a patient receives a negative result they are strongly advised to repeat the process three months later.
Could it be that healthcare workers were not communicating the need to return for another test in such a way that patients understood the importance of this step? Or perhaps patients were not advised to come back at all?
While the above explanation remains mere speculation, details in the newspaper articles are sketchy and it would seem that the matter needs further investigation. If the matter is left as is, the problem could reoccur in the future.
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