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Talking to health professionals about PrEP

As more and more of us start to use PrEP, we’re encountering health professionals who are asking us questions about our PrEP use, or who don’t know as much about PrEP as we’d hope.

It’s easy to think that the health staff we encounter – including dentists, GPs (family doctors), nurses, health care practitioners, hospital staff, and mental health workers – will know all about PrEP. After all, it’s something that many of us feel strongly about.

The reality is that many health professionals don’t know as much about PrEP as we might expect or hope. Our health services introduce hundreds of new drugs and technologies every year – and unless a staff member works in a specialist area (such as sexual health) – they won’t necessarily have had training and updates about each of these new drugs or technologies.

It’s tempting to be frustrated and annoyed if a health professional doesn’t know as much as we’d hope about PrEP. We know that some health workers make assumptions about our sexuality or HIV status if we say we’re using PrEP. We also know some people have received judgemental responses about their sex lives when we talk about our PrEP use.

Right from the inception of PrEPster we’ve believed that PrEP users can be the most powerful and important PrEP educators. Helping health professionals know more about PrEP directly from us can be a great way of ensuring the next PrEP user gets a more informed response.

Most health professionals do amazing jobs (even more so during the recent COVID pandemic). Their jobs are often stressful and challenging – and so we urge you to use these education moments respectfully and constructively. We all learn best when we’re being supported!

This document is regularly updated – please email us at hello@prepster.info to suggest amends and updates.

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We asked PrEP users who had chatted to their health providers about the top PrEP information they had shared. They told us:

“When I’m talking to people about PrEP I explain it’s a new way of using anti-HIV drugs to prevent HIV. I frame it really positively as an evidence-based, relatively simple and very effective way that people can be really pro-active in protecting themselves against HIV.”

“I reminded my family doctor that using PrEP is me taking responsibility for taking care of myself. I get more monitoring and screening for STIs than I ever did before.”

“I know that health care providers can have limited bandwidth, because they are often busy, and so I provide headlines. I emphasise that when PrEP’s taken properly, it is almost 100% effective. I also say how PrEP has massively reduced HIV infections, in ways we’d previously not imagined.”