Living with Hepatitis C Virus: A Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis of Qualitative Literature

Box 1

Themes explored by included studies.

Disruption to daily life

“You cannot fight it; it is not a tiredness that you can fight like a normal tiredness. A normal tiredness, you can fight it and get a second wind or if you had a few cups of coffee, it would keep you going. None of this works with this tiredness” [3].

Communication

“There’s 750 prisoners. So he goes on and tells people ‘Right you’ve got AIDS, you’ve got hep C, you’ve got this, you’ve got that. Next customer’” [1].

Impact of diagnosis

“My youngest…keeps asking me how old I am because I don’t go here, there and everywhere with her. And she says ‘How old is that now, does that mean that you are middle aged now?’…And she would say how old is her friend’s mum and she is always comparing me with her” [4].

Preferences for care

“There isn’t a network, there is just a specialist that sort of looks at one aspect of everything it seems. What I feel like sometimes is that you [health care practitioners] are building or putting together a puzzle without the picture” [2].

Stigma

“The Doctor rang me at home at 11.30pm and said ‘you’ve got Hep C. You’re a junkie, aren’t you?…’ I had never been a drug user, I had never met an intravenous drug user in my life! He said ‘you could have only got it if you were a junkie’. So I thought that was just stupid, I dismissed the diagnosis” [5].