The National Australian Hepatitis C Point-of-Care Testing Program provided testing for its first participant in January 2022. The objectives of the National 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 National 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.
