Barts Health HIV services celebrate Professionals of the Year award

The Barts Health HIV team providing services from the Grahame Hayton Unit have been honoured with the Professionals of the Year award from Positive East.

The Grahame Hayton Unit, situated at The Royal London Hospital is one of the largest HIV units in the country, and the tertiary referral centre for HIV services in NE London and Essex. Seeing over 2800 patients each year, the Unit provides care for newly diagnosed patients, chronic care of patients and also offers specialist care for cancers, hepatitis C infection, neurology, renal and metabolic complications of HIV.

Mark Santos, Director of Positive East, said: “Positive East is absolutely delighted to award the Grahame Hayton Unit our Professionals of the year award. We are incredibly lucky to have excellent HIV clinics across north east London and the Grahame Hayton Unit team are an example of such excellence where the person is truly the focus and centre of their care.

“The clinic takes a holistic approach to ensuring the health and wellbeing of their patients recognising that to get the best outcomes for their patients they need to address their biomedical as well as their social care and support needs. The Grahame Hayton Unit are great partners to Positive East and other HIV charities and in doing so ensure an integrated pathway of care.

“On behalf of Positive East’s clients, staff, volunteers and Trustees I would like to say a huge thank you to the team for all of their amazing, inspirational and hard work which improves the lives of so many people living with HIV.”

Nashaba Matin, HIV Clinical Lead for Barts Health, said: “We are incredibly proud to be recognised by Positive East as winners of the Positive East Professionals of the Year award 2014, and wish to thank them for considering us for this award.

“We couldn’t do the work we do without the support and collaboration of Positive East. The support they provide to our patients in times of great need and the collaboration between them and ourselves has been crucial for many of our patients to live a fulfilling and healthy life going forward.”

The team within the Grahame Hayton Unit are renowned for innovative and cutting edge initiatives – for example national testing campaigns for HIV and blood borne viruses. The clinical trials unit within the Unit is one of the top five recruiting centres within Barts Health and is a leading research and clinical trials unit for HIV therapies.  The Unit is a highly regarded training centre for HIV medicine for doctors and nurses and all allied health professionals.

Nashaba Matin, comments: “ Last year the team supported HIV testing across Trust hospitals as part of Going Viral, a Barts Health campaign to routinely test emergency patients for common viruses HIV, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C, and found a much higher prevalence of HIV in patients at The Royal London Hospital (1.22% against a national prevalence of 0.37%) than in the general population. With December marking World Aids Day we encourage everyone living in Tower Hamlets to get themselves checked.”