Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taken to reduce the effect of stigma on late presentation and delayed diagnosis of alcohol-related liver disease.

The Department is not currently taking specific steps to reduce the effect of stigma on presentation and diagnosis of alcohol-related liver disease. However, there is an ongoing focus on reducing the stigma attached to alcohol use including promoting public awareness of how to lessen alcohol consumption, a preventable risk factor for liver disease, through the NHS ‘Better Health’ campaign, making training to raise awareness of alcohol stigma freely available to NHS frontline staff via the NHS e-learning for healthcare website and specifying ‘provision of trust-wide education and training in relation to alcohol’ as an explicit responsibility for Alcohol Care Team (ACT) staff in the ACT Core Service Descriptor.

More broadly, through commitments in the Drug Strategy and NHS Long Term Plan, we are facilitating more people in need into local authority commissioned alcohol treatment. Additional treatment and recovery funding, made available through the Drug Strategy, can be used to increase capacity for screening for liver fibrosis in treatment settings and to establish effective referral pathways with hepatology.