Article Text

Download PDFPDF
HIV malingering in the accident and emergency department.
  1. J Ryan,
  2. C B Taylor,
  3. G D Bryant,
  4. A T Nayagam,
  5. J Sanders
  1. Department of Accident and Emergency Medicine, Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton.

    Abstract

    This paper reports a number of cases of patients attending an accident and emergency (A&E) department claiming to be HIV positive when they have been tested negative and are known to be negative by other departments in the hospital. The reasons for these patients claims are not always apparent. These patients may place an inappropriate workload on an already busy department. We caution doctors working in A&E departments to be vigilant when dealing with patients who claim to be HIV positive when there are no clinical or laboratory findings to substantiate the claim and we recommend liaison between relevant departments within a hospital and the patient's general practitioner (GP) when dealing with these patients.

    Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.