The Australian Hepatitis C Point-of-Care Testing Program provided testing for its first participant in January 2022. The objectives of the Australian Hepatitis C Point-of-Care Testing Program are to increase testing and linkage to treatment and reduce the burden of disease in line with state, national and global HCV strategies.
The Australian HCV Point-of-Care Testing Program will be the first internationally to evaluate scale-up of point-of-care HCV RNA testing on treatment uptake among people at-risk of HCV in a range of different healthcare settings, providing critical information on this approach towards reducing HCV prevalence in Australia. The information from this project will help to understand barriers to testing scale-up and treatment uptake to facilitate HCV elimination efforts in Australia and globally.
