Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:40 pm on 6 November 2019.
I’m very pleased to be able to contribute to this debate, even though I wasn’t a member of the health committee during the inquiry itself. This was a subject that I was very eager for the committee to look into when I was a member of it, and I very much welcome the publication of the report on this very important subject.
Now, there is a genuine opportunity for us here in Wales to achieve this simple but very exciting aim of eliminating hepatitis C in its entirety. Yes, there’s a target from the World Health Organization to eliminate it by 2030, but we could move according to a tighter timescale. Scotland and England have already set themselves a stricter target, and the Hepatitis C Trust have said to the committee that, because Wales has a relatively low number of people living in it to find and to treat, we could be the first nation in the UK to eliminate this disease. But, of course, we need a very strong strategy in order to do that and it’s very disappointing to read the conclusions of the committee that we’re not on the right course to reach the target of elimination by 2030 even, at the moment.
The belief is that potentially half of those in Wales who have hepatitis C haven’t received a diagnosis yet, partly because of the asymptomatic nature of hep C, so people sometimes receive a misdiagnosis. Perhaps people aren't aware that they're in a risk category—people who perhaps have used drugs in the past and haven't done so for decades and think that the risk has passed; potentially, users of drugs or injections to improve their image or performance in sport, even—people who don't consider that they're using injections in a dirty way, as it were, and so who don't have access to substance abuse services and are losing out on the important messages that are shared in those contexts as well.
So, I do welcome the recommendation to have an awareness raising campaign—a targeted campaign—to target those at-risk groups as well as providing training to professional health workers. It became very clear to me over the past few years that the challenge is not to treat those who already have the disease but to find those who have the disease but don’t know it. And the Government itself admits in its response to the committee's recommendations that patients are very hard to reach. So, do let us use every means at our disposal to reach them, whether by letting people know who could be at risk; using every opportunity to test; improving the testing for hepatitis C in prisons in Wales, as the report recommends; also looking at other opportunities—testing when people register with a GP, and so on. There are many ways of reaching out to people, and an awareness-raising campaign should also let people know how easy it is to treat— and how easy it is to have the test in the first place, but also how easy it is to treat hepatitis C on early diagnosis.
There is good work being done and firm foundations laid already in many ways, and I thank those within the health system and charities and so on for the major steps forward that they have taken in this regard. But we do have to ensure that there is a commitment by the health boards and the Welsh Government to move towards elimination and we should consider targets as a minimum as well, not as a maximum, so that we can treat as many people as possible and identify as many of those as possible who have hepatitis C, and that’s to save money in the long term, as well. So, as I said, there is a genuine opportunity here for us in Wales. Please do let us ensure that everything possible is done so that we don't lose out on this golden opportunity.