All county-level and above hospitals in Xinjiang to set up free AIDS counseling

Urumqi - Reporters learned from the Xinjiang Department of Health that after today, all public hospitals at the county-level and above will provide a free AIDS counseling service to the public, and each county will designate one hospital specifically for AIDS treatment.

The current "Autonomous Region AIDS Clinical Treatment Management Strategy" is still implementing standards for AIDS clinical treatment work in Xinjiang.

According to this document, from now on, the assigned AIDS treatment centers in Xinjiang will be divided into hospitals responsible for anti-retroviral treatment, hospitals responsible for Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (including some bigger country-level hospitals with integrated Obstetric and Maternal and Child Health Departments), and clinics. Together they will undertake AIDS Voluntary Counseling and Testing, Behavioral Intervention, and AIDS Prevention Education. Anytime a new AIDS patient is discovered, he or she must be referred in a timely fashion to one of the designated AIDS hospitals. After the patient has been treated and stabilized at one of these sites, he or she is then referred to local-level community clinic for continuation of care.

Currently there are 10 or so formal AIDS VCT clinics in Xinjiang, all of which are found in provincial-level hospitals. These counseling clinics provide legal counseling and medical information free of charge, and after today will begin to launch an AIDS testing service as well.