World AIDS Day again – when we spare a thought for the looped red ribbon. This is particularly true of the HIV health and social care community, which includes our NHS Community HIV Specialist Service, which works across Brighton & Hove and West Sussex.
Most people with HIV attend their clinic regularly and have very little to do with us – they take their meds, have blood checks done from time to time, see their consultants or clinic nurses, and get on with their lives.
As with many long term conditions, the meds are vital. Without them, as those that died in the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, a person’s immune system becomes compromised and they become vulnerable to disease. But life is complicated, and in Brighton & Hove and Sussex a number of people have other issues in their lives – including drug and alcohol, homelessness, MH problems, social issues including isolation, and other medical conditions.
This potential chaos makes it much harder for them to keep to their medication regime, and that’s where we come in at the Community HIV Specialist Service, supporting and encouraging such people in the community to keep taking their medications, so they remain as healthy as possible and out of hospital.
We can do health checks in the community. We also help support people who are newly diagnosed with HIV. We understand how hard it is to be thinking of HIV medication when you have so much else going on in your life.
We work very closely with other services such as HIV clinics, the Sussex Beacon, Terrence Higgins Trust, Change Grow Live and others to support this most vulnerable and marginalised section of the wider community.
Through the determination of the HIV health community, and of patients who wish to stay healthy, as well as constant steps forward in medical therapies, it’s relatively rare these days to hear of an HIV positive person to die of an AIDS-related illness. But of course people do pass from time to time, and some of the ones that do are patients we’ve seen and have been friendly with for many years.
Medical and social care workers often impacted by their deaths almost as much as their family and friends are. And this year, as we always do, we’ll be at the vigil, supporting each other, remembering our friends who have gone and celebrating those who are still here, all of us part of the wider community of love.
