This document is written for national HIV surveillance programme staff responsible for monitoring trends in country HIV epidemics. Its purpose is to describe how routine prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) programme data can be used to conduct HIV surveillance among pregnant women attending antenatal clinics (ANC). These guidelines assume that surveillance programmes have already assessed the readiness of routine programme data to be used for surveillance. WHO’s 2013 Guidelines for assessing the utility of prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) programme data for HIV sentinel surveillance among pregnant women describes these assessment methods.

This document is intended for epidemiologists, statisticians and laboratory technicians responsible for the use of HIV incidence assays for surveillance and epidemic monitoring purposes. People that are not technical experts in this field may prefer to first read the UNAIDS/WHO Working Group on Global HIV/AIDS and STI Surveillance published guidelines on When and How to Use Assays for Recent Infection to Estimate HIV Incidence at a Population Level for a basic introduction to this topic.