TO look after the welfare of transgender constituents, the Quezon City government is looking for possible sites to build a transgender support center.
Mayor Herbert Bautista tasked the city health officer, Dr. Verdades Linga, to ensure the delivery of responsive and sensitive health-care services to the city’s transgender residents.
The proposed clinic shall provide basic screening and testing for sexually transmitted infections, regular health appraisal services and psychological and social services, such as life-coaching and case management and counseling, through service delivery network, Linga said.
Dr. Rolando Cruz, the city’s human immunodeficiency virus and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome program coordinator, reported that transgenders—male to female—constitute the second largest population being tested for HIV, next only to males having sex with male (MSMs).
Apart from the establishment of a social hygiene clinic for transgenders, the city health department also unveiled plans for the development of an electronic health information system in the different city government-run sundown social hygiene clinics, creation of a one-stop-shop for sundown clinics and providing MSMs, especially young people, greater access to HIV testing, condoms and HIV lectures.
Quezon City operates about three sundown clinics, one is the Klinika Bernardo, the country’s first male sundown clinic.
A sundown clinic offers HIV screening from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. to accommodate the varying schedules of the male sector, especially the young working male population.
The clinic also serves as a diagnostic, treatment and referral facility for patients with sexual related diseases
Linga said the city’s health department, investment target for its HIV/AIDS control program for 2016 is P120 million.
Based on the AIDS/HIV registry of the health department, 427 HIV cases in Quezon City have been reported in the first six months of 2016.
Majority of cases reported involved sexual transmission by MSMs.