Can I also thank Julie Morgan, in particular, for bringing forward this debate, as I know how much work, Julie, you’ve done on this issue and I fully endorse the sentiments and proposals set out in the motion? I think we can all be proud of the record here in Wales of the diagnosis and treatment of hepatitis C, and, of course, welcome a continued commitment to achieve the eradication of the disease by 2030.

But it’s on the third point of the motion that I would like to focus my comments, and, in particular, to look at the issues of screening healthcare workers, particularly surgeons. To support this, I would like to refer to the case of a constituent of mine who was diagnosed with a rare form of hepatitis C in 2012. She’d been suffering symptoms for a number of years, but was only ever tested for hepatitis A and B. When she was eventually tested for, and diagnosed with, hepatitis C she was on the verge of liver cirrhosis. But her treatment—despite the debilitating side effects, and the stigma that she suffered and the precautions that she had to take within the family in terms of use of toothbrushes and other equipment in the house—was very quickly effective. She responded to the treatment within a matter of weeks, having been told to expect that it would take many months, and has had nothing but praise for the treatment that she received at that point. But what had remained a mystery was how she contracted the illness in the first place. It was only towards the end of her treatment that the specialist nurse who was treating her identified that she was also treating a surgeon who’d operated on my constituent in 1997.

So, once the source of her infection had been identified, NHS Wales wrote to some 5,000 patients treated by this surgeon, offering to test them for hepatitis C. Around 3,000 of those patients responded, and, from that subsequent testing, a further four patients were identified as having contracted the virus, almost certainly from the same surgeon.

Llywydd, since 2007, all NHS staff involved in exposure-prone procedures are required to be screened, but there is no screening requirement for current staff who have been practicing since before 2007. Now, obviously, where any practicing surgeon is found to have hep C, he or she is taken off current duties. But there is no automatic process of looking back at the practice of the affected surgeon to identify and contact patients who might have been at risk. Such a look-back only happens when it’s approved by the UK advisory panel, as happened in the case of my constituent. As I understand it, the UK advisory panel guidance for pre-2007 healthcare workers places a clear expectation on surgeons to put themselves forward for testing if they believe that they may have been exposed to a communicable disease.

Now, hepatitis C has been referred to by some as the hidden killer. Now, whether that’s an appropriate description is debatable, but it has gained that tag because those who have it often don’t know, as we’ve already heard, and, as we’ve also already heard, we have an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 people in Wales who carry the virus, the majority of whom remain undiagnosed. Often causing no symptoms and no sickness, hepatitis C can lie dormant in a person’s body for decades. In this context, it’s quite likely that many health professionals will not actually be able to identify themselves as a carrier of the hepatitis C virus.

Now, I recently wrote to the Minister for Social Services and Public Health regarding the particular circumstances pertaining to my constituent, including issues around the limitation of compensation arrangements for hep C sufferers, whereby patients infected by their surgeons have no access to compensation, unlike those infected by contaminated blood. Now, I’ll come back to that at another time, because today I want to concentrate on the eradication aspect.

So, given the widespread recognition that one of the biggest challenges to achieving eradication by 2030 is the extent to which the disease goes undiagnosed, I’d like to think that, building on Mark Isherwood’s theme of expanding screening, if a regime of screening healthcare workers on a more comprehensive basis, including those practicing before 2007, could assist in identifying latent cases amongst practitioners, and therefore potentially their former patients, I’d suggest this is something that the Welsh Government should give serious consideration to when developing its strategy for reaching the ambitious but very achievable target of eradicating the virus by 2030.

So, once again, can I thank Julie for bringing forward this motion and for the debate today, and ask Welsh Government to consider all measures available that might help to attain the eradication of hepatitis C in Wales?