Hospital zero hepatitis: Easy and useful!

Abstract

Introduction: 59000 hepatitis C patients were unknown or not followed in France. In 2017, 81% of our “new” patients have already been hospitalized, especially in emergency units. Hepatitis C was noted in their file as other medical histories like appendicitis or shin fracture! Drug users came one to twelve times per year in hospital for different reasons, but never for hepatitis care. No HCV care was proposed to these patients after other health problem resolution. Objective: To identify HCV patients coming to our hospital by using nurses of every service for a goal of zero hepatitis hospital. Methodology: Our hepatitis specialized nurse did training sessions of nurses in every unit of our hospital about hepatitis screening, diagnosis and treatment and when to call hepatitis nurse if they had HCV positive patient and gave specific flyers and posters. Results: In 15 months, hepatitis nurse did training sessions in 15 units of our hospital, including 92 nurses. We received 58 calls about 52 patients with hepatitis C; 50/58 patients were current or formers drug users, 32 patients are known as negative viral load, spontaneously or after antiviral treatment; 20 had positive viral load and took care by our team; 13 started immediately DAA. All drug users had also risk reduction session. Conclusion: Hospital nurses training was easy to set up and cheap and useful to detect new patients or known patients without medical care, specially drug users. Same project could be done in every hospital. *Correspondence to: Remy Andre-Jean, Mobile Hepatitis Team, Perpignan Hospital, France, Tel: 0468616137; E-mail: andre.remy@ch-perpignan.fr