London, 14th Feb 2006 - Gordon Roddick today issued a Valentine's Day call for tougher action to tackle Hepatitis C - exactly a year since his late wife Dame Anita Roddick revealed she had the killer disease.
His plea comes as a new report into hepatitis C services across the country, entitled ‘Location, Location, Location’, reveals that treatment is a postcode lottery. Up to 400,000 people could be infected but undiagnosed and yet only one third of primary care trusts are following Government guidelines for tackling this disease.
Gordon Roddick said: “For the first year after Anita’s diagnosis, we really didn’t think Hep C was serious at all. We just didn’t know.
“It is a scandal that three years after the Government published an action plan on Hep C, only a third of PCTs are actually implementing it. Anita wanted us to be the best in the world when it came to tackling Hep C. She would be exasperated to see that we are still lagging so far behind countries like France, Germany and Italy.
“If Anita was still here today she would say ‘Wake Up! Hep C is slowly killing hundreds of thousand of people in the UK‘.
“PCTs are the frontline. They are responsible for diagnosing these people and making sure hospitals have the funds to treat them. Letting people die because you can’t be bothered to put proper services in place is totally unacceptable.
Body Shop founder and green campaigner Anita Roddick chose February 14th 2006 to tell the world that she had hepatitis C. She died in September 2007, aged 64.
Hepatitis C is often known as the ‘silent killer’ as people can live with it undiagnosed and without symptoms for many years. Today’s report from an all-party group of MPs and Peers shows that the majority of PCTs are ignoring Government guidelines, prompting calls for stricter targets to diagnose and treat hepatitis C to save lives.
Findings from the All-Party Parliamentary Hepatology Group (APPHG) report Location, Location, Location:
- Just one third of PCTs are implementing Government guidelines on tackling hepatitis C
- 15 per cent of PCTs have minimal or no implementation
- More than 1/3 of PCTs have no protocol for hepatitis C testing and screening
- Patients face treatment delays of more than three months, or delays are not monitored, at more than half of the PCTs
David Amess, Co-Chair of the APPHG, said: “We are still a long way from effective country-wide implementation of the Hepatitis C Action plan. Indeed the discrepancies between the best and worst performing PCTs are just as wide as when we held our last audit in 2006. The Government’s action plan is clearly not working. We are today calling for the Department of Health to introduce an enforceable reform strategy which sets a clear direction for services and requires providers to implement best practice at every stage of the patient pathway.”
Durham PCT, which ranked the best in the country for hepatitis C services, has been presented with the inaugural Hepatitis C Trust ‘Anita Roddick’ Award, created to reward and promote best practice in the diagnosis and treatment of hepatitis C.
Gordon Roddick said: “Valentine’s day is the day you think of those you love. I am thinking of Anita today, as I do on all days. This award doesn’t just say well done to Durham, it asks low scoring PCTs how they can possibly justify their failure.”
