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Changes to board of trustees

The Hepatitis Foundation has received notification of Chris Cunningham’s resignation from its board of trustees. With the Covid-19 pandemic reaching our shores, Chris has a large number of calls on his time, including his work in Māori and indigenous health and the well-being of his students and staff, as they remain at especially high risk in the current circumstances. The board fully accepts the need for Chris to prioritise his time and skills during this unprecedented event. The ...

Hepatitis road shows on hold

The hepatitis road shows planned for various locations around the North Island from next month have been postponed due to COVID-19.   The shows aimed to raise awareness of hepatitis and educate health professionals on how to treat people with the virus and were due to start in April. New dates will be advised as soon as possible."While the postponement is disappointing, we are following government advice and regulations," Hepatitis Foundation CEO Susan Hay says. "The safety of all...

New chair for Hepatitis Foundation

A new chair has been appointed to the Hepatitis Foundation of NZ. William Rainger was voted in as chair on January 20. He’s currently the Auckland Public Health Service medical officer of health and has a strong background in governance, strategic leadership and operational management for organisations. He has more than 20 years’ experience in health services management. “The board is very excited to welcome William as chair. He brings extensive health care experience and has a...

How to look after your liver

Looking after your liver simply means living a healthy lifestyle.Minimise alcohol intake. It can damage liver cells and lead to swelling or scarring, which can in turn lead to cirrhosis. Guidelines say men should drink no more than two drinks a day and women only one. Having two alcohol-free days a week is recommended.Eat a healthy diet and get regular exercise. This will help you keep your weight under control, which helps prevent non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition that can also lea...

Chinese focus for liver health nurses

New Zealand’s Chinese communities are among the highest risk groups for hepatitis B. That’s why the Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand will be increasing efforts to engage with them in 2020.These engagement initiatives include next month’s Chinese New Year festival in Auckland. Two of the organisation’s community nurses will be attending the festival to raise awareness of hepatitis B. The hepatitis B virus is highly contagious and spreads from person to person through bodily fluids...

Review launched into Charities Services report

The Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand (HFNZ) has engaged KPMG to investigate two potential issues about expenses raised by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) in 2015. DIA’s Charities Services investigated four issues and, while it found there was no serious wrongdoing on two of the issues, it appears inconclusive on two other issues. It set out expectations on matters for HFNZ to continue to improve. The foundation’s CEO, Susan Hay, says the organisation is very conscious o...

Plenty of highlights in 2019 for Hepatitis Foundation

The Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand looks back on a successful year as the end of 2019 approaches. As part of its work to raise awareness of and educate people about hepatitis, the Whakatane-based organisation partnered with video production company BullsEye Productions to develop and launch online education videos aimed at helping healthcare professionals stay informed and keep up with best practice developments. The videos feature on this website and our social media c...

Electronic results now offered

The Hepatitis Foundation of NZ (HFNZ) is now offering blood test results via email .The move aims to provide people with their test results in a more timely fashion and is part of HFNZ’s change to a more digital way of working. All patients enrolled in HFNZ’s long-term monitoring programme can opt in to receive their results by email. Text results will also be available at a later date.Over the past two years HFNZ has been increasing its use of digital technology for managing records, p...

What is fatty liver disease?

Fatty liver is a condition that is increasingly common in New Zealand and around the western world, as larger numbers of people are identified as overweight or obese. But there are other causes of the condition. Fatty liver is diagnosed when there is a build-up of fat within liver cells, and this happens when there is more fat entering the liver than what is leaving after processing.  SymptomsFatty liver doesn’t have any symptoms for most people. It may just be that the liver is found to ...

Healthcare administrator becomes accidental IT hero

Whakatane health care administrator Amanda Cooper was named 2019’s accidental IT hero award at the NZ Charities Tech Awards on August 15, 2019.Amanda, who works for the Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand, has played a pivotal role in the organisation’s move  to a digital cloud-based way of working over the past 18 months. This has involved undertaking user acceptability testing of Dynamics CRM during the development phase, providing quality assurance and audit on the ...

Hope for hepatitis elimination

When I was working as an HIV-AIDS activist I met Helena. She was in a hospital, her diagnosis was HIV-hepatitis C (HCV) co-infection, and it was in a terminal stage. Nobody wanted to see her and nursing staff rarely came into her room; not even her family came. One day she asks me with her already-broken voice to call her family. She wanted to see her mother and her daughter. I called them, but the response from the other side of the telephone line was negative. I was never able to tell Helena.&...

Online hepatitis education modules launched

To mark World Hepatitis Day this year, the Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand has produced an online education video series to give health care professionals a valuable source of training. The videos were launched on Friday, July 26 and aim to help health care professionals to stay informed and keep up with best practice developments. The resources cover various topics including understanding hepatitis B blood testing, priority groups for hepatitis vaccination, patient management and a his...

Hepatitis Foundation calls on govt to fix IT systems

The blunt message, in a submission to the Health and Disability System Review, says the current state of healthcare IT communications and interoperability “creates serious limitations and impediments” to screening, surveillance and management programs.“Without government intervention and compulsion towards standards, we will continue to waste resources and potentially lives trying to hold together an information-sharing system designed for the mid-1990s,” the foundation’s chief executi...

Foundation guards ‘treasure’ trove of data in search for hepatitis B cure

I’m not sure what I expected the headquarters of a national organisation with the high profile of the Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand to look like; perhaps not a nondescript brick former hostel in the suburbs of Whakatāne.Many people are surprised when they find out, says chief executive Susan Hay. They think it’s in Wellington. “They ask, ‘What’s your address downtown?,’” Ms Hay laughs.The fact it is in the Bay of Plenty is a historical accident. Whakatane Hospital lab techn...

National portrait: Hepatitis C treatment pioneer Ed Gane

No-one knew what it was. A new type of hepatitis linked to drug use and blood transfusions. Best case scenario, they would stay alive long enough to make it to Australia for a transplant. Even then, about a quarter would get the disease in the new liver and die within a few years.That was the 1980s, when Ed Gane was a newly minted registrar in Auckland. Most liver failure patients had hepatitis B, which was mostly contracted in childhood and for which there was no cure. But Gane's mentor, C...

They know I will chase them - nurse’s mission to save community from hep B

Ms Purcell was involved in the ground-breaking project led by Charge Technologist and founder of the Hepatitis Foundation, Sandy Milne in 1984 which tested 93 per cent of the population of Kawerau in the Bay of Plenty to ascertain the extent of hepatitis B infection in the area.Today, she is revisiting many of those people as part of the long­est longitudinal hep B study ever conducted. Some of the partici­pants clearly remember how, as children in the 1980s, they were not allowed to...

Smoother referral process for GPs

GPs can refer patients to us electronically via CareSelect, HealthLink (our EDI is NZhepfnd), Best Practice or Medtech. Alternatively GPs can email us.This new process aims to support better collaboration between health partners and ensure all people living with hepatitis get the help, monitoring and treatment they need....

Local GPs a focus for hepatitis competition

The Whakatane-based organisation is giving away a morning tea to the GP clinic with the most creative hepatitis display board. Entries are welcomed from around the country but foundation chief executive Susan Hay says she’d particularly like to see local entries. The foundation has a long history in the Eastern Bay; shortly after forming in 1984 it implemented a seroprevalence study that saw 93 percent of Kawerau’s population tested for hepatitis B. The results showed that the hepatitis B vi...

Community programme helps in hepatitis treatment

We are running a new community programme to give GPs the chance to host Fibroscan® clinics in their surgeries. Fibroscans are simple tests that determine whether liver damage is present. It is one of the most important things someone living with hepatitis can do to assess the health of their liver. International guidelines recommend adults with hepatitis B have a Fibroscan to assess for liver disease progression. Th...

Registrations open for nurse conference

The Hepatitis Foundation of New Zealand’s 2019 national nurse conference will be held in Whakatane.The annual conference, on from October 3-4, aims to keep nurses in the primary care, prison, public health and midwifery fields up to date with hepatitis news and developments. This is the first time it has been held in the Eastern Bay.While the foundation is based in Whakatane, last year’s conference was held in Wellington to make it accessible for nurses around NZ. Previous conferen...

New CEO for World Hepatitis Alliance

The World Hepatitis Alliance is pleased to announce Cary James as its new CEO. Cary brings decades of experience in public health programmes and health policy at national and international levels. He has worked extensively in hepatitis and HIV response, having developed innovative and successful campaigns and collaborated with numerous civil society organisations during his time as a member of the leadership team at the UK’s Terrence Higgins Trust. He has been part of international advisory pa...