Experts by experience

Participants in the Staying Safe hepatitis C prevention project gave invaluable insight into life-saving protective practices. The findings could be used to make harm reduction messages much more relevant.

The Staying Safe study is a hepatitis C prevention project with a difference. Instead of focusing on risk practices and transmission events, such as the sharing of needles and syringes, we were interested in how protective practices arose and were maintained over time. Here, people who had been injecting for the long-term and who did not have hepatitis C were the experts – or the ‘cases’, with those who had hepatitis C also interviewed as ‘controls’.

The process included developing a life history timeline, which helped to jog people’s memories about significant events, but more importantly allowed us to explore the interconnection between people’s protective and risk practices and what was going on in their lives at the time.

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