What is the role of the criminal law in relation to HIV medicine? Medical practitioners and other health care workers provide testing, diagnosis, counsel and care – but the use of the criminal law to prosecute people with HIV means health professionals may also find themselves entangled in a criminal investigation. What should we tell patients about their rights and responsibilities when it comes to HIV transmission or exposure? Taking medical and legal notions of consent as its starting point, this presentation will explore the complex and problematic impacts of HIV criminalisation on medical practice and the lives of people living with HIV, discuss the unrealised potential for the criminal law to be a healing process, and provide some guidance for practitioners who need to balance their roles as health providers with the legalities of HIV transmission and exposure.