Private MD News

City officials plan to quiz doctors on their knowledge of HIV testing

Category: HIV

Physicians are on the front line in the battle against HIV and AIDS. However, some experts have said that too few are familiar with the disease and that this causes them to miss many opportunities to offer HIV testing.

In an effort to encourage more doctors to learn about the infection, the city government of Washington, D.C. is planning to administer a quiz to the city's more than 4,000 physicians to see how much they know about HIV, according to the Washington Post.

The quiz will test their knowledge about demographic groups that are at the highest risk for the disease as well as whether or not they are familiar with the federal government's HIV testing recommendations.

"We suspect there are gaps in doctors' understanding of testing guidelines that have changed considerably, and we really hope to understand where they are so we can address any gaps," said John Newsome, a spokesman for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, a nonprofit group working with city officials on the initiative, according to the news source.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there are more than 1 million people in the U.S. infected with HIV. The concentration of infection is particularly high in Washington, D.C.