#BeFreeofHepC

The Brook Place Addiction Services team are working alongside the Hep C U Later team and Hepatology department in the Royal Hospital.  Hayley Curran, a Recovery Co-ordinator for the team, shares the success of the 'drive week' where patients are encouraged to attend for testing below:

"My name is Hayley and I have been working on our Hep C U Later project locally with the Brook Place Team and also externally with the acute hospital trust and Hep C Later regional and National teams. The Project is to support the elimination of Hepatitis C, which requires our service to pro-actively engage, test and work with patients in eliminating this disease.

I have taken a Lead Champion role in managing this project including completing a data audit and cleanse consisting of over 800 patients and working with the acute trust to share data (utilising an information sharing agreement) to ensure the data is cleansed and used by the team to effectively target patients who require testing and treatment. I have engaged in meetings with regional and local teams and throughout, raised staff member awareness and participation to the projects aims.

The whole Brook Place team and I planned a ‘drive week’ where patients are encouraged to attend for testing, maintaining the data and working with other agencies to motivate patients to engage with this week and the process moving forward. I believe we all managed to achieve the deadlines and outcomes expected and over the 3 months of planning and co-ordinating and 5 weeks of testing. Our KPI statistics and patient care has dramatically improved and will be identified in the quarterly figures and presented at the meetings. We will also continue at a steady pace to keep monitoring and testing patients so we will steadily achieve local and national targets.

The projects initial aim has been achieved and successful by data cleansing and identifying patients for testing.  Although the drive week was an initial project, this project will be part of our day-to-day work and to ensure this has been embedded with the team, managers, and current and new patients. 

We continue to support external agencies including, Gilead, the Hep C U Later Trust, and acute Trust at the RLUH who have all been extremely complimentary about the positive work that has occurred at Brook Place, which results in overall aims of the National Hep C U Later Trust to be achieved longer term.

Data from the successful week can be found below:

We are promoting another drive day at Brook Place on 14 June and are hoping this to be successful like the drive week."