Ex-entertainment workers using quick HIV test boost Aids fight in Asia
Using entertainment industry veterans to administer a finger-prick blood test has doubled the number of at-risk people getting checked for HIV in Cambodia, and may be key to scaling up testing for the virus
It's 9pm and the night is just beginning at a popular entertainment establishment in Phnom Penh. Diners enjoy a meal at a restaurant on the ground floor, the rooms on the middle level reverberate with popular songs, and the top floor is a hotel.
In a corner next to several karaoke rooms, a serious conversation is taking place amid the laughter, strobe lights, brightly dressed women and loud male customers. Five entertainment workers are sitting on a sofa talking about why they don't get tested for HIV.
"I don't know where to go," says one woman. Agreeing, a co-worker adds: "I dare not go. I am too afraid."
Their interviewer is Rath Chan Molika. The 22-year-old recently quit her job as an entertainment worker and is now an outreach worker and lay counsellor with Smartgirl, a sexual health and empowerment programme for entertainment workers that provides community-based HIV testing.
Molika says the women feared getting tested at public health clinics because they're scared of going alone, as well as of the needle and blood.
But with Smartgirl, a pioneering programme launched in April 2013 and one of the first of its kind in the region, things are changing. The traditional test - drawing blood with a needle and syringe for lab analysis - is replaced with a rapid finger prick test that can be done by trained counsellors at any location at any time.