Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of peer support in increasing the number of people engaged in hepatitis C care pathways.

Most recent estimates suggest that around 160,000 people in England are living with hepatitis C (HCV) infection. Precise figures of the number who remain undiagnosed are not available, however, an estimate of the proportion of people who inject drugs who are diagnosed can be obtained from the Unlinked Anonymous monitoring survey. In this survey, only around one half of people injecting psychoactive drugs sampled are aware of their HCV antibody positive status (53% in 2015), and this figure has remained relatively stable at this level (averaging 52%) over the past decade.

The precise number of people diagnosed since reporting began is not available. However, over nearly two decades there has been a steady increase in the number of laboratory confirmed reports of HCV (ever-infected) in England, with a more than fivefold increase between 1996 and 2015. In 2015, 11,605 laboratory reports of individuals testing positive for antibodies to HCV were reported.

No specific assessment has been undertaken of the effectiveness of peer support in increasing the number of people engaged in HCV care pathways.

NHS England has a specification for 22 HCV Operational Delivery Networks (ODNs) to develop local partnerships with a range of stakeholders in order to maximise appropriate uptake and completion of HCV treatment and to cure more people of infection.

One requirement of the ODN is to develop links to third sector services to support adherence, peer support and self-management programmes.