Action: for patients

You can request a blood test for hepatitis B and C through your local doctor (General Practitioner or GP).

Testing for hepatitis B or C is very simple – this is usually done by:

• Blood test. This requires a small amount of blood being taken from the arm, which is sent away for analysis. GPs and practice nurses can perform this test.
• Saliva swab, for hepatitis C only. The infection itself is NOT present in saliva, but can indicate if the virus has ever been present in the body. A blood test will confirm this.

“Think about your visits home – if you ever visited the barber, or if you had to seek medical treatment and had to have an injection for anything. This might be a long time ago – 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. If any of these things happened, get tested. If someone close to you or in your family has ever had hep B or C, get tested.”
Shabana Begum, Community Officer, The Hepatitis C Trust (former Hep C patient)

For further reading and organisations offering services and support, click here. 

If you work for a community group/organisation or mosque and would like to share the films more widely, we have DVDs and posters available, for community screenings, health and wellbeing events, or similar. The DVD has both the English and Urdu films; please be in touch to order a batch. You can also download the poster here. The films are suitable to share with both medical colleagues as well as patients. 

Support the World Hepatitis Alliance's campaign, Think Again, to spread the message through social media posts. To sign up and for more information, click here. 

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