AQW 7659/17-22

Mr Andrew Muir
Alliance Party
North Down

Tabled Date: 25/09/2020
Answered On Date: 14/10/2020
Priority Written: No

Question:
To ask the Minister of Health for an update on efforts to increase availability of free sexual health home testing kits.

Answer:

The HSCB and PHA continue to work with all Health and Social Care Trust genitourinary medical (GUM) teams to agree, disseminate and deliver a service model that is fit for delivery under pandemic circumstances. This will reduce face to face patient contact to the minimum essential for patient safety and therefore will rely heavily on sexually transmitted infections (STI) online testing for monitoring of patients taking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).

In total there were 1,973 orders for STI home testing kits issued in June; 2,600 in July and 1,886 in August. The statistics for September will not be issued for another 3 weeks.