Theme: Models of Care Year: 2024
Background: National Health Service England (NHSE) plans to eliminate Hepatitis C (HCV) in England by 2025 and has selected prisons as an area of focus to achieve this goal. Since 2019 to support NHSE in their HCV elimination program, Gilead Medical Scientists (MS) have worked with English prison stakeholders to optimise their HCV screening and linkage-to-care. As part of this, for a number of years the team have delivered accredited blood borne virus (BBV) training to prison healthcare teams. Until recently the gold standard was to deliver BBV training on a site-by-site basis either virtually or in person. However, increasingly BBV training sessions were delivered to very few healthcare staff (1 or 2) or were cancelled at short notice due low staffing levels, competing demands and shift patterns.
Description of model of care/intervention/program:
The Gilead MS team decided to pilot a monthly interactive online version of the BBV training that would target multiple prisons simultaneously. This pilot offered several benefits:
•More autonomy for sites to arrange who would attend the training and when.
•Reduction in travel time and costs.
•BBV Training being delivered simultaneously across multiple sites and providers including across different geographies allowing for sharing of experiences and practices.
•Staff being able to join training from alternative locations.
•Ability for sites to arrange training as part of their new staff induction.
Effectiveness: To date, two sessions have been run with 80 delegates attending, which has demonstrated the ongoing demand for training and benefits of including an online version.
Conclusion and next steps:
Based on the success of our pilot, our intention is to continue to run the online BBV Training monthly and to extend to multiple prison healthcare providers. Feedback is consistently sought to ensure maximum training efficiency.
Disclosure of Interest Statement:
Gilead Sciences Ltd has provided funding to partnered prison healthcare providers and plays an active role in the design and execution of the activities that form this Prison HCV Elimination Program. The above training involved no product promotion.