Mr. Marcus Keane:

I thank the Deputy for the question. Under the national hepatitis C treatment programme, you have the programme advisory group and the clinical advisory group. The policy barriers are not intentional and are not things that have been set up to frustrate the system; they are legacy issues. There are examples of them having been dealt with in some locations and in certain circumstances but it is not consistent across the country. I will give a couple of examples. It is not consistently the case that medication is available through community pharmacies. In some places it is still just coming through hospital pharmacies which is obviously a barrier to care for people. Similarly, in Dublin we have very good examples of care. We have nurses who do phlebotomy in the community, peers who can do testing in the community and link people very quickly to hospital care if they need it. We can contrast that with experiences outside Dublin. I spoke to some people where the situation was that a GP could test in the community but there was one test that needed to be done in a lab and the lab would only accept it if it had been signed off by the consultant. That leads to a narrowing of the pipe where people must pass through a consultant's books in order to get tested. It is about removing those types of barriers that may have made sense at some stage in the past but do not any more.