Welcome to the Sentinel Surveillance of Hepatitis Testing website
The sentinel surveillance study of hepatitis testing (also known as the denominator study), which began in 2002, aims to supplement routine surveillance of hepatitis B and C in England and to improve our understanding of the epidemiology of these infections.
It is carried out by the Health Protection Agency (HPA; formerly the Public Health Laboratory Service Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre) and funded by the English Department of Health.
The study collects information on all hepatitis A, B and C testing carried out in participating sentinel laboratories, allowing analysis of trends in testing and prevalence.
Test results and demographic details for people being tested are extracted electronically from laboratory information systems on a monthly basis and forwarded to the study co-ordinator at Leeds. The data are cleaned, checked and anonymised and then sent for analysis to Centre for Infections in Colindale.
The study has MREC ethical approval and is fully compliant with patient confidentiality requirements, as set out in the Caldicott Report.
This website was designed to help relay the information gathered by the study to the participating sites. The data is stored in an active database to which participating laboratories and their local Health Protection Units have access.
Study participants can log in to the website using the form on the left-hand side of this page.If you are not a study participant, you can view the most up-to-date results from the study on the Study Results page. Our most recent publications can be found under Further Information. 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.