The Sentinel Surveillance of Hepatitis Testing website is currently being updated.
Please contact Sarah Collins with any data requests.
Welcome to the Sentinel Surveillance of Hepatitis Testing website
The sentinel surveillance study of hepatitis testing (also known as the denominator study), began in 2002. The study gathers information on hepatitis A, B and C which are all types of viral hepatitis (for more information on hepatitis see NHS Choices). The purpose of the study is to collect data on hepatitis testing, to increase our understanding of hepatiits C in England.
The study is carried out by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) at the Centre for Infections and funded by the English Department of Health. Ethical approval has been granted by Northern and Yorkshire MREC. The data held by the study are anonymised and fulfil the guidelines Caldicott Report to ensure that patient confidentiality is maintained at all times.
A small number of laboratories across England participate in the study; these laboratories provide a representative sample of all English laboratories. Each month hepatitis test results and demographic data (age, sex) are extracted from the participating laboratories (often called sentinel laboratories) laboratory information system (which collects details of all the hepatitis test requests and results). This information is sent electronically through secure sytems to the study co-ordinator, where it is processed. The processed data are then sent to Centre for Infections in Colindale to be analysed.
The study data provides information on the age and sex of people being tested for hepatitis A, B or C, regardless of the test result. This means that we can look at the number of people being tested over time, as well as the number of people who are positive. These results can improve our understanding of the epidemiology of hepatitis A, B and C.
This website can designed to help relay the information gathered by the study to the participating sentinel laboratories. The data are stored in an active database to which participating laboratories and their local Health Protection Units have password protected access, via a secure server. The data are not accessible via this website to members of the general public. However, summary reports are available and can be found on the Study Results page. More detailed information can be found under Further Information which includes our recent publications.
Study participants can log in to the website using the form on the left-hand side of this page. For an user log-on and password, please contact Sarah Collins.
If you have any comments or questions about the study or the website, please get in touch: contact details for the web team and study staff are available from the Contacts page. Please contact Sarah Collins if you have questions about any aspect of the study.