Partner Notification: A Handbook for Designing and Implementing Programs and Services

Partner Notification: A Handbook for Designing and Implementing Programs and Services was developed as a technical update on successful partner notification (PN) programs, offering a synthesis of best practices, models, challenges, and solutions that can be used to develop and implement effective PN programs. 

Comprehensive HIV testing services, including PN, are critical links into the HIV and AIDS treatment cascade and essential to achieving widespread testing of those at risk. Partner notification testing is a voluntary process whereby a trained provider, health worker, or counselor asks the index patient about potential exposures, including sexual partners, drug injecting partners, or the patient’s children. PN can serve to identify those at highest risk of HIV, and in some cases, primary partners and contacts lead to the identification of secondary and tertiary networks. 

This handbook reflects guidance laid out in WHO’s Consolidated Guidelines on HIV Testing Services (2015), and builds on WHO’s Guidelines on HIV Self-Testing and Partner Notification: Supplement to Consolidated Guidelines on HIV Testing Services (2016). This handbook expands on that guidance by including information from a literature review and semi-structured interviews with national HIV program administrators, counselors and other health providers, and administrators of nongovernmental organizations. Practical steps to implement PN were developed based on this review.

The intended audience is policymakers, program managers, health care workers, and trained providers who can use this guide to develop PN policies and implement programs tailored to the country environment. JSI/AIDSFree Project. 2018.