Collecting Blood Samples for Home HIV Tests

Video Transcript

"Ok, now we're going to prep and stick our finger to collect a blood sample, and I've set things up here kind of, sort of, how I would set them up in a doctor's office or other healthcare setting if I were working there. I've got my alcohol pad ready to go. I've got the sample collector right there. No worries, ready to get all the blood on there that I can. Something you may or may have not seen in your doctor's office is, we take one half of the band aid off it's paper and stick it to something hanging for easy rip and stick action as I like to say. The lance is uncapped so that's ready. The gauze pad is there if I need it, but I don't anticipate needing it. Knowing myself, I don't bleed too terribly much. So the first thing I did was to wash my hands thoroughly, soap and water, and dry them thoroughly. Like I suggested previously that not only ensures you're working with clean hands, but it helps to stimulate the area. Another good thing to do is just sort of rub your hands a bit and get them warm. Cold hands won't bleed as readily and won't produce as much of a sample as you may or may not need. And I'm going to be using one of the sides of my middle finger on my left hand. So I'm going to take the alcohol pad and wipe my entire finger just for good measure, and then you want to give that just a second to dry. You don't want to blow on it or wave it around because that just encourages germs to land on the area you just sterilized. Alcohol evaporates pretty quickly and the only possible side effect of having undried alcohol on your finger is that it might make the lancet stick a little stingy. So I've got my lancet, I've taken off the safety, the safety cap and it's quite easy. You just press it into your finger and an automatic finger will get the blood to draw. So here we go. And there you have it. I've made the poke, and now the next thing to do is to gently massage my finger to generate an ample blood sample. Get that little fuzzy out of there. And you might want to do this right over the blood collector if you're not as accustomed to drawing a blood sample. I'm going to go ahead and, here's this, I'm just showing you this before I set it back down. I'm going to start laying my sample on to the circle, and the test instructions are pretty specific about filling the circle entirely with blood. So you just remilk the wound that you've already created and keep using all the blood you can get out of it. The instructions suggest that if something doesn't go quite right and you feel that you need to use the second lancet, you call an 800 number that they provide, but I'm fairly confident as a healthcare professional that I am not only putting an ample amount of blood into the circle and filling it completely, but that the sample I'm giving them is sound and will enable them to test for the antibodies that they need to test for. "