Theme: Models of Care Year: 2024
Background: NHS England (NHSE) are seeking to achieve the elimination of Hepatitis C (HCV) ahead of the WHO target of 2030 and as the virus primarily affects people who inject drugs it is important that there are effective testing, referral, and treatment pathways for those accessing drug treatment services (DTS). The HCV DTS Provider Forum was established by Gilead Sciences under the NHSE HCV Elimination Program and brings together 5 of the largest third sector providers of DTS in England alongside 14 NHS Trusts and The Hepatitis C Trust to encourage collaboration, innovation and best practice sharing as we work towards a shared ambition of achieving HCV elimination.
Description of model of care/intervention: Through a collaboratively established review process, and by consensus agreement, the HCV DTS Provider Forum finalised detailed DTS standards, providing good and consistent practice measures for HCV and other Blood Borne Virus (BBV) service provision across sites which now serves as a checklist for services. There are eight core standards, as per figure 1 below, and the document sets out Essential, Aspirational and Exceptional domains.
Effectiveness: Feedback from DTS Provider Forum members suggests that the core standards have been adopted widely across the English providers of DTS and support allocation of resources to clinical pathways aligned to people’s need and help to ensure that staff and service training needs continue to be met, drive improvements in the use of data, and have had positive impact on external engagement with those responsible for clinical treatment.
Conclusion and next steps: Agreeing a core standard of service provision at sector level can support DTS to be more effective in allocating available resources to HCV and BBV pathways, drive consistency and improve testing and referral rates. Further engagement with those responsible for commissioning services may be required to support the embedding and longer-term maintenance and sustainability of improved testing, referral, and treatment pathways.
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