At the Brisbane Street premises of Dubbo Sexual Health on World AIDS Day, the director of Sydney Sexual Health Centre spoke of " a lot of optimism around HIV treatment in particular at the moment".

"Everyone should go on treatment as soon as they're diagnosed because the evidence is that if you start early, basically your health outcomes are far better than if you wait," Dr McNulty said.

As she spoke NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner announced to the state that the NSW HIV Strategy 2012-2015 had resulted in "a strong increase in testing and treatment and a steady decline in new HIV diagnosis".

She said the 2016-2020 strategy reflected the government's "ambitious aim to virtually eliminate HIV transmission in NSW by 2020".

New measures aimed at preventing the spread of HIV by making testing easier and more accessible include pop-up rapid testing sites, the removal of the co-payment on S100 drugs and the granting of permission for community pharmacies to dispense antiretroviral drugs.

The government will also implement a pilot program that will allow people to collect their own samples for HIV testing and release a suite of new resources to help GPs and their patients "at the critical time when a new diagnosis of HIV is made".

Mrs Skinner said 91 per cent of the people diagnosed with HIV and accessing public sexual health services were "on treatment".

"Around 11,500 people in NSW live with HIV but around one-in-seven are unaware they are infected. We must and will change this," she said.

Dr McNulty said "potentially" there were residents of Dubbo unaware of their HIV-positive status.

Reaching out to them involved making services accessible "so people don't feel they will be judged when they present for testing" and raising community awareness of "effective treatments", she said.

Dr McNulty said HIV-positive people "can live as long as anyone else".

"People speculate that HIV-positive people may even live longer than people of equivalent age simply because they see their doctors more regularly and therefore get interventions around other aspects of their health," she said.

For more than a decade the Sydney Sexual Health Centre has been sending doctors to the Western NSW and Far West local health districts in support of their sexual health services.

Dubbo Sexual Health can be contacted by calling 1800 851 700.

To view the NSW HIV Strategy 2016-2020, go to www.health.nsw.gov.au.

For information on HIV testing, go to www.health.nsw.gov.au or call the NSW Sexual Health Infolink on 1800 451 624.