Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many people diagnosed with hepatitis C are eligible for treatment under the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance for new direct acting antiviral drugs.

Based on National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) modelling, NHS England has planned for 10,000 patients to be treated in 2016/17. No national registry exists for hepatitis C and as a result NICE estimates that the NHS should be treating 10,000 people based on the total number of people diagnosed with hepatitis C, their genotype, their treatment history and their disease severity, all of which impact on treatment eligibility.