For the past year, the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles facility at3220 Pennsylvania Ave. SE has been offering free HIV testing alongside license renewals and driving tests. It’s all part of a program spearheaded by the D.C. nonprofit Family and Medical Counseling Service and GileadPharmaceutical to increase HIV awareness and promote testing across the District, which has a 3 percent infection rate.Fulwood-Wood, chief operations officer at Family and Medical, says the program has already tested 5,000 at the DMV and just expanded to a new location at the Income Maintenance Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. How did you come up with the idea to offer HIV tests at the DMV? We started talking with Gilead about a year-and-a-half ago regarding the DMV. We were exploring kind of large-scale venues where we wanted to reach a good cross-section of D.C. residents to promote HIV testing and offer testing. The DMV — everyone has to go there at some point — became a good venue for that.
Has it been difficult to convince people to get tested at the DMV? We went in thinking as you do anytime you embark on something new, that [the] worst nightmare’s come true and every single person will say no. But we’ve tested over 5,000 people. People are willing to take the HIV test in non-traditional settings. The response has been really good. We thought we’d test 3,200 people in our first year at the DMV and now we’ve tested over 5,000.
What’s next for this program? We started in the Income Maintenance Center yesterday. It’s a similar type of site in the sense that people are coming in to apply for different types of services — and of course there’s a wait. We’re approaching everyone while they wait. – Aubrey Whelan
