NHS Tayside

This project aimed to establish a care pathway in community pharmacy, to enable people who inject drugs to obtain a cure for hepatitis C (HCV), without needing to access any other healthcare facility. The team engaged with 56 community pharmacies and trained them to test, diagnose, assess for treatment and deliver a cure for HCV using direct-acting antiviral drugs.

Pharmacy staff were trained to take a capillary blood sample from patients. This was posted to the local laboratory for analysis of antibodies for HCV, hepatitis B and HIV, and the pharmacies received back the results.

For patients who showed antibodies for HCV, the team organised for a nurse to visit the pharmacy and take a further series of safety bloods to evaluate the patient as suitable for treatment.