“The George House Trust, which is an HIV charity in Manchester, offered a positive speakers training programme on HIV. It found, when training NHS staff, that less than half of the health professionals interviewed were able to correctly identify the routes for HIV transmission from a list of routes shown to them. I spoke to a former nurse who worked at an NHS hospital in the north-west, who was diagnosed as HIV-positive and had some difficulty coming to terms with that. In a short space of time his employment at the hospital was ended because he was made to feel so uncomfortable by the staff that he had worked with. He currently receives treatment at another hospital some distance away. A lot of the problems are down to the fact that there is still a great deal of ignorance on the part of NHS staff. One would expect that people working in the health service would have the best knowledge, but that is not so at the moment.”

- David Borrow (Lab, South Ribble), speaking in parliament this week