Ms Michele Tait:

There were patients getting the older treatments. The treatment programme has been using the new directly acting antivirals, with the new curative treatment that has been up and running since 2015. Prior to that, an older treatment was available mostly through the hospital setting. Very few patients went on that treatment but some did get that treatment in drug treatment centres. One or two programmes were running but they had very small numbers of patients and the outcomes for those patients were not great. It was not a good course of treatment. The pilots for the new, recent curative treatments for hepatitis C were set up to look at the feasibility, accessibility, sustainability and safety of using those treatments in that setting. In the first 15 or 16 months of those pilot programmes, where we have commenced approximately 150 patients, we have learned that it is safe, feasible and acceptable to the people who work in those clinics and their patients and also that the outcomes are the same if not better than for patients in a hospital setting.