July 10, 2009

New Facility Fills HIV Care Gap in Arlington County, Va.

A new health facility has opened two blocks down the road from the former Whitman-Walker Clinic in Arlington County, Virginia, in an effort to offer care to some of the HIV-positive clients who were treated at the clinic before it closed this year because of financial constraints, The Washington Post reports.

Whitman-Walker had served clients in Northern Virginia for more than a decade. The new site is run by the Inova Juniper Project, which operates five other clinics for HIV-positive clients.

According to the ReGina Newkirk, director of development, communications and community relations for Whitman-Walker, 170 out of 678 of Whitman-Walker’s clients have been transferred to one of the six Inova Jumper Program sites. An additional 143 patients are now receiving care at one of two Whitman-Walker sites in Washington, DC, while a smaller number has moved to other providers, including the Casey Center in Alexandria, Virginia, and the Carl Vogel Center and George Washington University, both in DC. Newkirk said the remaining patients could not be reached.

The Virginia Department of Health said that at the end of last year there were 1,314 reported HIV/AIDS cases in Arlington

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Jon, Arlington, VA, 2009-07-26 02:07:48
As a patient of the Inova Juniper Program this is probably not a better choice than the Whitman Walker Clinic. The Inova Juniper Program is riddled with frequent administrative errors such as missed appointments, missing lab results, not returning telephone calls. This applies to all levels of staff of this program from The Director all the way down to nurses and assistants to the receptionist. I would avoid this organization and not recommend it as a health care/HIV choice.