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.
The way in which patient data are reported is changing as part of our ongoing programme to improve quality.
A newly designed and implemented de-duplication process allows us to make additional checks of patient records to identify and exclude duplicate patients within the existing dataset. All reporting from this point forward; will exclude these duplicate patient records, i.e. the first quarterly Health Protection Report for 2009, and on the Sentinel Surveillance of Hepatitis Testing website. Therefore it is likely that the data produced will be reduced when compared to that presented previously. We feel that this additional duplicate patient process will produce even more accurate data
Please do not hesitate to contact Sarah Collins if you have questions about this change or any other aspect of the study.
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.