Resources

This document summarises The Hepatitis C Trust’s Outreach and Testing Van service, which aims to increase diagnoses by reaching groups who may be at risk of hep C but who currently cannot, or do not, access testing through existing means. Given that most people in the UK today are undiagnosed, the testing van aims to overcome some of the key barriers to diagnosis.

This Public Health England report covers the findings of analyses of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic response on sexually transmitted infection (STI), HIV and viral hepatitis service provision and epidemiology. Despite a resurgence in hepatitis C testing and treatment initiations from June 2020, testing and treatment initiations in the summer of 2020 were considerably lower than in corresponding months in 2019. The report notes that "HCV testing through traditional venues may not have reached those in greatest need", describing this is "of particular concern".

The Government’s plans for reform across the NHS, public health and adult social care are designed to enable services to deliver improved outcomes. The cornerstone will be a framework of accountability that focuses squarely on how well services are improving outcomes for people. For the NHS, this begins with accountability at a national level focused on health outcomes. An NHS Outcomes Framework was developed to provide national level accountability for the outcomes that the NHS delivers. This document sets out the first NHS Outcomes Framework.

Hepatitis C may be the serious disease that most combines widespread prevalence with widespread ignorance. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), this urgent public health problem kills 350,000 people per year, and 150 million have the chronic form of the hepatitis C virus (HCV). The incidence of new infections is simply not known at the global level. Yet, HCV is entirely preventable and largely curable.