The Healthlink project presented key aspects of work to overcome HIV

At the weekly staff meeting of the Ministry of Health, project director Khrystyna Brodych presented the Healthlink project, which aims to accelerate Ukraine's efforts to overcome HIV. Healthlink is one of the largest HIV testing projects in Ukraine. It is implemented with the support of USAID and embodied by the NGO "100 Percent of Life" in cooperation with the Alliance for Public Health. Every third newly identified person living with HIV (PLHIV) in the country has been tested as part of the HealthLink project.

“This project is aimed at identifying HIV-positive cases and increasing the number of people who are aware of their status. Simplifying access to testing, preventing, and treating people with HIV has been our main goal over the past five years. During this period, working on the basis of medical institutions, we tested 875 thousand people, of which 21.5 thousand first learned about their HIV-positive status. This was made possible by close cooperation with the Ministry of Health, the National Health Service of Ukraine, the Center for Public Health, and directly with healthcare institutions,” said project director Khrystyna Brodych. 

The project operates on the basis of 200 healthcare institutions, 27 public and charitable organizations, and more than 10 thousand specialists are involved. During the period of operation of the project, 18 thousand people started HAART. 

The project team created prozdorovia.in.ua - the first Ukrainian-language portal about public health, where you can order an oral HIV test by mail. The site is useful for NGO specialists and the medical community because it provides an opportunity to get constantly updated thematic useful materials for viewing online and downloading. For hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, the portal allows choosing the most convenient method and place of HIV testing, get PrEP, and order an oral HIV test at home.

In the conditions of emergency challenges of a full-scale war, when 10% of project medical institutions are located in the temporarily occupied territories, and 25 suffered as a result of military operations, in the absence of basic security for conducting full-fledged activities, lack of employees, as well as an extreme burden on those who provide services, the effectiveness of detecting HIV-positive people in the project has increased. During the year of the full-scale war, more than 83 thousand Ukrainians were tested for HIV, 3.5 thousand of them learned about their HIV-positive status and 3.2 thousand have already started treatment.  

The project team continues to provide all services in the 12 regions of Ukraine most affected by the HIV epidemic: Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Kherson, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kyiv oblasts and Kyiv city. At the same time, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, HealthLink has expanded its activities to three western regions of Ukraine: Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Zakarpattia oblasts. 

This year, the project will focus its efforts on another important area – the restoration of medical services. In particular, attention will be focused on improving the quality of medical services and restoring primary medical care in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast, which is suffering damage as a result of shelling, including medical infrastructure. 

It should be recalled that key aspects of the implementation of the USAID Project “Innovations to Overcome the HIV Epidemic” were presented.