PROVIDENCIALES, Turks and Caicos Islands; Friday, February 27^th, 2009 - The National AIDS Programme in the Ministry of Health and Human Services will be conducting a five–days training course in Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT).

Master trainers from the Bahamas Mrs. Bernadette Saunders and Mrs. Elechiemae Lunn will be facilitating the training; with the course seeing participants drawn from the government and private health care settings and other backgrounds.

The Voluntary Counseling and Testing course will run from March 2 – March 6, 2009 and will be held at the Environmental Health Center, The Bight, Providenciales.

The course aims to achieve the following objectives:

• Train a cohort of counselors for VCT
• Improve the technical capacity of health care workers to provide VCT
• Identification of potential trainers to build capacity within the TCI programme for ongoing training strengthening of VCT services at the programmatic level through the provision of final report with recommendations for continued training programme development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

The workshop is receiving financial support from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) and The Department for International Development (DFID) Project: “Taking action against HIV/AIDS in the UK OTs.”