Asked by: Peter Bottomley (Conservative - Worthing West)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve awareness of hepatitis C among primary care professionals.
Answered by Seema Kennedy
A variety of initiatives are underway in England to improve hepatitis C awareness and case finding, re-engagement and linkage to care, especially in drug services, primary care, prisons and accident and emergency centres. In addition, NHS England is funding access to new hepatitis C treatments in accordance with guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
Public Health England has developed and shared materials with a range of stakeholders, including the voluntary sector, to help raise awareness of hepatitis C infection and highlight the need for those at risk to seek testing and treatment. The resources and materials available comprise of posters, a quiz, social media videos and social banners in a variety of different languages; all of these resources are available online to download or order by healthcare professionals as well as the public themselves.
Asked by: Peter Bottomley (Conservative - Worthing West)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of trialling opt-out testing for (a) hepatitis C, (b) HIV and (c) other blood-borne viruses in emergency care settings.
Answered by Seema Kennedy
NHS England specialised commissioning does not run a national programme of opt-out screening within emergency care settings. NHS England is aware of some hospital trusts that have implemented an opt-out screening protocol within emergency care settings, but this is not routine practice in all hospitals. Where opt-out is implemented there are posters on display advising patients, attending the emergency department, that they will be tested unless they tell their attending clinician that they want to opt-out and do not wish to be tested.
Opportunistic testing for blood-borne diseases may also occur in non-traditional healthcare settings frequently used by people who inject drugs (or used to), such as doctors’ surgeries, community pharmacies, prisons and sexual health centres.
Asked by: Peter Bottomley (Conservative - Worthing West)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of producing a hepatitis C elimination strategy to support the recently announced NHS England deal to help eliminate hepatitis C.
Answered by Seema Kennedy
The Government is committed to meeting the World Health Organization (WHO) target of eliminating hepatitis C by 2030 but there are no plans at this time to publish a strategy to eliminate hepatitis C. A variety of initiatives are underway in England to improve awareness and case finding, re-engagement and linkage to care, especially in drug services, primary care, prisons and accident and emergency centres. In addition, NHS England is funding access to new hepatitis C treatments in accordance with guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
A summary of progress towards achieving the elimination goal was published in 2017 in Public Health England’s report, ‘Hepatitis C in the UK’ at the following link:
This showed that the United Kingdom is on target to meet the WHO interim goal of reducing hepatitis C mortality by 10% by 2020. Better access to improved treatment has led to the first fall in deaths from severe hepatitis C related liver disease in a decade.