Lord Dholakia – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Dholakia on 2016-02-24.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Prior of Brampton on 9 February (HL5469), of those tested, how many were subsequently diagnosed with (1) hepatitis B, (2) hepatitis C, and (3) HIV, over the same time period.

Lord Prior of Brampton

Public Health England (PHE) collects data on people in prison tested for blood-borne viruses (BBVs) via the Sentinel Surveillance Study. This system does not currently receive reports from all prisons in England where testing occurs currently 28 prisons report data. Table 1 below shows data from this system on the total number of prisoners tested positive for BBVs in the calendar years 2012-2014. Similar information from this study for the year 2015 will not be available until mid-2016. NHS England also collects data on levels of testing for BBVs in prisons via the Health & Justice Indicators of Performance. The numbers of positive tests for BBVs in these data are presented in Table 2 using currently available data. The higher number is due to the greater coverage of prisons by this dataset.

Table 1: Reported levels of positive tests for BBVs for people in prisons for calendar years 2012-14

Source: PHE Sentinel Surveillance Study

Table 2: Reported levels of positive tests for BBVs for people in prisons from April 2015 to December 2015

Source: NHS England