Screening: Prisoners

(asked on 22nd March 2016) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether he has taken steps to provide national guidance to ensure that healthcare and wider staff in prisons are given adequate levels of training around blood-borne viruses as recommended by The Hepatitis C Trust's recent report, The blood-borne virus opt-out testing policy for prisons in England: An analysis of need towards full implementation, published on 3 March 2016.


Answered by
 Portrait
Ben Gummer
This question was answered on 24th March 2016

Implementation of opt-out testing for blood-borne viruses (BBVs) in all adult prisons in England in a shared priority for Public Health England (PHE), NHS England and the National Offender Management Service as published in our second National Partnership Agreement for 2015-16.

To support implementation, PHE and its partners, including The Hepatitis C Trust among other third sector organisations, have developed a broad range of range of resources to support prison healthcare teams. These include information leaflets and posters, testing algorithms, web-based and DVD resources which cover all aspects of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of Hepatitis C and other BBVs to support prison healthcare teams in offering testing, managing both positive and negative results, providing advice on harm minimisation and supporting people into treatment.

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