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A spotlight on a Hepatitis C GP Champion
In this blog Dr Nick Ballantyne outlines his journey to becoming a hepatitis C GP Champion, the work he is doing to support other GPs to eliminate hepatitis C, and the practical steps GPs can take.
Why are you a Hepatitis C GP Champion?
I first met the Hep C U Later team at the RCGP annual conference in Glasgow in October 2023. I was attracted to the inspiring story that Hepatitis C was now a curable condition, and the challenge was around we could locate these individuals to share the good news and support them with treatment. This struck a chord with me, having had a family member suffer from the consequences of chronic Hepatitis C in an era prior to an understanding of both the virus itself, and the now highly effective long-term treatments.
Following on from this, I was later introduced to Louise Hansford from Hep C U Later at a community wellbeing day within my area of GP work. The possibility of working as a GP Champion was discussed, and the opportunity filled me with excitement.
The GP Champion role fit brilliantly with my desire to improve population health and address the widening health inequalities within Primary Care. It also opened my eyes to a much wider network of wonderful individuals within the healthcare system, stretching across NHS England, regional hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, local drug and alcohol services, and extraordinary charitable organisations, who are all motivated and united with a common goal, with the ability to reach and impact every individual and inclusion group within the population.
After reviewing the wealth of resources on the Hep C U later website, I met with the Hepatitis C Operational Delivery Network (ODN), and the GP Champion team, and agreed to take on the role as GP Champion for Wessex, which has remained a truly uplifting and fulfilling role within my portfolio GP career.
What work are you doing to support the elimination of hepatitis C?
The main area of my work has been to engage with GP Practices in the Wessex area to perform a search of patient records. We have been looking specifically at practice patients who are coded as having Hepatitis C and we check their care history to ensure that they have had the appropriate management. Through this tool, we have found a sizeable number of individuals who still require curative treatment, and it is truly rewarding being able to support them through this journey. We have also updated many hundreds of records of patients, to ensure that their medical information remains accurate for their Hepatitis C status, and that we can demonstrate the NHS targets for finally eliminating Hepatitis C in England.
These searches have reviewed nearly 400,000 patient records, stretching across GP practices in the entire Wessex region, across Weymouth, Poole, Bournemouth, Southampton, and Portsmouth. We have focussed our searches to cover areas of highest socioeconomic deprivation, and areas with known higher rates of intravenous drug use, to ensure that we make the greatest differences to addressing the health inequalities present in the region.
I have also met with many other GP Champions across the South of England, to support their case finding, and ensure that they can make the greatest changes in their areas with their available resources.
This work has been performed alongside the fantastic Wessex Hepatitis C Clinical Van team, and the recruitment of 7 enthusiastic GP trainees to perform the searches within their own practices.
Why should GPs get involved with hepatitis C elimination?
Being part of the Wessex ODN is a truly refreshing experience, where so many individuals from the health sector, charitable sector, and third sector are bound together with a unified goal and formulate novel ways to achieve it.
Alongside the multitude of Hepatitis C management initiatives taking places across England, there are many exciting future projects arising from the ODN structure, including ways to address Hepatitis B management, and address the widening liver health inequalities we are now seeing so clearly.
To me, it feels like the embodiment of population health, and for any GPs who wish to broaden their horizons and see healthcare in its most inclusive and cooperative form, then I encourage you to reach out to your local ODN team. The Hep C U Later website contains a wealth of excellent resources around Viral Hepatitis, and by signing up to the newsletter and expressing your interest in this, the Hep C team will be in touch to discuss further opportunities available in your area.