SERVICE as USUAL

Ever been snapped at by a ‘dragon receptionist’ while waiting for your hospital appointment? Ever been given the cold shoulder by a dentist’s assistant? Or ever simply felt like your GP isn’t paying you enough attention?
There is no doubt that HIV patients face discrimination from a minority of NHS staff, and it does not take much digging to find plenty of horror stories from discontented patients. Here are a few examples:
On a recent visit to her GP, a patient was asked about her job at Terrence Higgins Trust (THT). She offered to provide information and literature regarding THT and issues faced by people living with HIV. Her doctor simply replied: “No thank you. We don’t get those sort of people here.”
An HIV positive man was diagnosed as impotent at a London hospital and was prescribed Viagra. When he subsequently changed his address, he took a letter from the hospital to his new GP to get a prescription. Once the GP found out he was HIV positive, he refused to prescribe him any more Viagra on the grounds that doing so would encourage the man to have sex and thereby spread HIV to other people.
A patient said that his London dentist had refused to make any appointment for him, except at the very end of the day. The dentist claimed that there was a ‘regulation’ that

photo: getty images

dentists were only able to give that appointment time to people with HIV because they had to sterilise all the

equipment after his visit.