Hepatitis C

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 10 May 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:04, 10 May 2022

Llywydd, I'm familiar with the report of the committee, which was of course published in 2019, and its recommendations—I know the Member understands this—have been interrupted by the pandemic. Actually, we have had some very important national evidence as a result of the pandemic, because we've had over 1,000 people who were street homeless back in 2019, when that report was written, who've been brought into accommodation because of the actions taken during the pandemic. And more than 1,000 service users are now benefiting from the new and nationally implemented treatment of Buvidal. At the most recent meeting of the Policing Partnership Board for Wales, we were joined by the Minister of State at the Home Office, Kit Malthouse, who said that Wales was the leading part of the United Kingdom in making sure that Buvidal was prescribed to people in those circumstances, and which will make a genuine difference in the issue of hepatitis C that we're discussing this afternoon. So, we've had, inadvertently and not in the way that the committee anticipated, that national experiment, which shows that it is possible to make inroads into some quite challenging populations, where efforts are co-ordinated and implemented with the sort of determination that we saw by our homelessness services when faced with the impact of a pandemic.