Hep Can't Wait East Asia Workshop
November 2024
Tokyo – Japan
The Hep Can’t Wait East Asia Workshop brought together hepatitis experts, healthcare professionals, advocates, and individuals living with hepatitis together to exchange insights, identify challenges, and explore solutions to scale up comprehensive hepatitis elimination programmes within the region.
Following the release of reports by the World Health Organization (WHO) in early 2024—including updates to the hepatitis B guidelines and the Global Hepatitis Report—which highlighted the rising mortality from hepatitis, we recognised the urgency of convening key opinion leaders in the region. Across two days, delegates discussed how to improve hepatitis B care, bridge the gaps in hepatitis C elimination, and strengthen awareness for the associated risks between hepatitis and liver cancer.
The outcome of the meeting was a number of calls to action which are detailed below and in the meeting report:
Calls to action
For health care settings:
- Adopt a patient-centred and shared decision-making model which takes into account safety, disease management risks, disease progression and patient preferences.
- Implement integrated care models, supported by updated and simplified guidelines, that promote collaborations between specialists and GPs.
- Promote multidisciplinary approaches through training GPs and non-specialists in disease management, monitoring, and referrals, and ensuring they are up to date on the latest guidelines.
- Develop referral and monitoring protocols which support integrated and multi-disciplinary care that improves patient retention in care.
- Leverage technology such as telemedicine and digital reminders to simplify processes.
- Create digital platforms, such as apps, to monitor and communicate with patients, ensuring timely interventions are implemented.
- Improve screening accessibility with universal programmes, mobile clinics and same-day point-of-care testing.
For policy:
- Prioritise hepatitis B and hepatitis C prevention, testing, treatment and surveillance.
- Reassess policies to improve the accessibility of treatments and diagnostics and improve disease management.
- Address financial barriers and implement government subsidies, that support lower costs and increased access.
- Address healthcare coverage disparities that affect remote areas; for example, costs are not always covered for remote areas or rural residents, who may thus need to bear out-of-pocket fees.
- Promote and support treatment strategies that use generic drugs to reduce costs, improve reimbursement policies, and expand coverage (full or partial) to increase treatment uptake.
- Facilitate patient engagement through government-run lectures, educating youth on risks and diseases, and enhancing advocacy at the government level via outreach programmes
- Improve and resource community-based programmes to work as part of a multidisciplinary team that is supporting care.
- Implement policy level changes to address stigma.
For communities:
- Strengthen peer support to maintain engagement with high-risk populations and ensure their understanding of and adherence to medical guidelines.
- Implement comprehensive communication strategies that share lived experiences, reduce stigma, and encourage testing.
- Enhance education around the fact that hepatitis can be asymptomatic, and its impact on the patient’s quality of life.
- Implement education in schools and facilitating discussions between people with lived experience and young people on awareness and prevention of hepatitis virus transmission.
- Develop programmes to reduce stigma and increase treatment acceptance.
Advocacy will be required by all stakeholders to ensure the above recommendations are implemented and this advocacy will be enhanced through:
- Collaboration across stakeholders.
- Developing impactful and tailored messages to trigger action.
- Integrating stories of lived experience within media campaigns to increase awareness.
- Ensure consistent messaging on diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of viral hepatitis is delivered in language which is accessible and understandable for the intended audience.
- Educating policymakers and other decision makers on integrating hepatitis services and the health and economic benefits of hepatitis elimination.
- Increasing discussions between people with lived experience and policymakers.