Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans Public Health England has to update the template, Hepatitis C: commissioning template for estimating disease prevalence, published in March 2014.

Public Health England is working on providing updated estimates of hepatitis C (HCV) prevalence and disease burden at the sub-national level, covering the 22 Operational Delivery Network (ODN) areas that deliver HCV treatments in England.

The new ODN HCV profile tool will make use of a broad range of HCV indicator data, including: surveillance data on HCV prevalence in people who inject drugs; the size of this key at-risk population; treatment and diagnoses, and; severe HCV-related liver disease. Modelling work is underway to link these data sources in a local ODN-level epidemic model, which will provide more robust estimates of prevalence, proportion diagnosed, future disease burden and projected impact of treatment for each ODN.