Theme: Epidemiology & Public Health Research Year: 2024
Background: To support NHSE in their HCV Elimination Program, a partnership between Gilead Sciences, Practice Plus Group (PPG) and the Hepatitis C Trust (HCT) was formed in 2019. PPG currently provides healthcare to 49 prisons England. PPG appointed Regional BBV Leads (RBLs) to co-ordinate directly with prison healthcare teams. This involved organising and delivering BBV training, introducing BBV point-of-care testing, reviewing and validating BBV prison data and creating strategies to optimise BBV testing in each specific prison.
We explore the impact of this project on accuracy of HIV reporting within prisons and review HIV prevalence across different prison estates, including a mixture of male and female, sentenced and unsentenced and different security categories.
Method: Data were collected using Systm1 electronic records from 13 prisons where healthcare is provided by Practice Plus Group across the East Midlands and East of England. These data were reported as two snapshots in January 2023 and January 2024
Results: Prevalence across all sites was 0.4% in 2023 and 2024, compared to 0.18% in the general population of England (estimated from 2021), with higher prevalence seen in female and sex offender estates (see table)
Prison reception HIV testing rates were generally high with an average uptake of 89% across all sites in 2024 (data not available for 2023)
HIV electronic record reporting errors dropped significantly from 46.8% in 2023 to 20.3% in 2024, with the number of patients awaiting confirmatory bloods reducing from 8.5% in 2023 to 6.4% in 2024. This may be attributable to increased training and awareness around BBV testing and pathways.
Conclusion: These data highlight the importance of HIV screening in prison populations, especially in female estates and sex offender prisons. Further work should be done nationally to ascertain prevalence and continue reducing data reporting errors.
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