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Table 3 Quotes and examples related to ‘Priority Population / Disease Groups’, including examples of health equity activities

From: The role of health protection teams in reducing health inequities: findings from a qualitative study

Quotes / Examples - Priority Population / Disease Groups

“We could do some prevention work that stops anybody getting ill and I think that if we then take a focus on particular populations at risk, which would be relatively straightforward to do, we could do a lot more prevention and joining up. We treat hepatitis B, and we treat invasive bacterial infections, and we’ll treat them all differently. It’s the same population that keeps popping up for all those infections. We could stop talking about infections and start talking about people and populations, and do something there.” (CCDC-I-18,022,022)

“So, one of our priorities, and these were all linked to the national TB strategy. So, the first one was around underserved population groups. So, we had a workstream looking at prison pathways. Improving detection of active disease and then looking at education and awareness and establishing a prison TB nurse network. We set up a network and working group and did some education and training sessions.” (PGM-I-09032022)

“Hep C elimination programme is funded by NHS England specialised commissioning, and they’re funding really focused activities to look at hep C elimination. Well, it’s the same risk group for TB, for Hep B, for HIV. So, there’s a real opportunity in there to look at, if instead of screening for one disease, so people not pathogens, you know they’re all saying that aren’t they at the moment. So, if we’re screening somebody for Hep C, why don’t we look at being able to screen for more than that?… You know, to look at it more holistically.” (PGM-I-09032022)

“We’re doing some work around Hep C elimination. So, a really tiny amendment to the SOP, in terms of, referring people for Hep C screening. It wasn’t there before; great opportunity. We’re also doing some work around when people are in hospital and it’s evident that they are an injecting drug user. Just a quick note to the presiding clinician “can you check that they’ve gotten Naloxone please?” I mean, how long does that take? It’s 15 s. It’s not obviously Health Protection work, but actually it’s, if you want to talk about sort of making every contact count, that’s a tiny tiny bit of our time for what is much more likely to save a life than the prophylaxis of meningo contacts, for example.” (CCDC-I-18,012,022)

“Many people live in houses in multiple occupation. And I think that’s probably an inequality we haven’t touched on, like the whole kind of, what is a household contact when you live with ten people you’ve never met, you don’t even know their first name, but everyone’s like leaving their razor in the bathroom? That’s another whole, there’s an opportunity we could make sure our guidance looks at houses of multiple occupation and things like that.” (CCDC-I-02032022)

“That was a big measles outbreak and so there was a lot of targeted work done with one of the consultants who had really close links to that community. She worked very closely with one of the rabbis, who led a lot of work in that community to increase vaccination rates.” (CCDC-FG-24,012,022)