The supplementary report examines a number of aspects of the psychosocial impact of infection with HIV, hepatitis C including:

• parents or carers making decisions about, or administering, blood products
• fear of infecting other family members, and the fear of being infected by a family member
• living with a predicted shorter lifespan
• dependence on welfare benefits
• awareness of deaths across the community of people infected
• campaigning over many years
• decisions about having children
• failure of treatment for infections
• notification of possible exposure to vCJD
• being subject to clinical trials, and 
• effects on the wider family including subsequent generations.  

At the end of expert hearings in February 2020, Inquiry Chair Sir Brian Langstaff asked the group for their views on how to minimise harm in the case of healthcare error, and how best to reduce the continuing stigma experienced by people infected with HIV and/or Hepatitis C in healthcare settings. 

The Inquiry published its first expert report on psychosocial issues in February 2020.

Any questions about the work of the experts should be directed to the Inquiry through contact@infectedbloodinquiry.org.uk, or by calling 0808 169 1377.

Anyone with a confirmed place to attend hearings will find information about the practical details in this factsheet, such as wearing face coverings, allocated seating in the hearing room and lounges, and maintaining 2m distance from other attendees outside your own household. The Inquiry will continue to provide psychological support, refreshments, and first aid at the hearings and will meet reasonable expenses. 

We have also extended the hours for telephone support while the hearings are ongoing. Confidential psychological support will be available from 12 until 6pm on any day when a hearing is taking place and can be accessed on 0800 458 9473 and 0203 417 0280. If you prefer to call at another time, you can leave a message and the team will call you back.

The Inquiry is today opening registration for the first three weeks of hearings this autumn.

The witnesses and presentations will relate to haemophilia centres, apart from the first witness who will be Lord David Owen on Tuesday 22 September.

These hearings are being held against the backdrop of the pandemic. In the June consultation on future hearings, a common theme among respondents was that the Inquiry should facilitate the participation of the public, media and legal representatives to the greatest extent possible consistent with safety.

The Inquiry team has carried out a thorough risk assessment and is confident that the risk of transmission of the coronavirus while attending a hearing is reduced, due to measures including reserved seating at 2m distance, the wearing of face coverings and thorough cleaning every evening. The full risk assessment is available here. The Inquiry will continue to provide psychological support, refreshments, and first aid at the hearings and will meet expenses incurred.

To facilitate the full participation of everyone watching proceedings remotely, there will be a live broadcast of the hearing sessions available for people who sign up to receive this closer to the time, in addition to the YouTube broadcast with a short time delay. The telephone support offered by the Inquiry’s British Red Cross team will operate throughout the hearings.

We are asking anyone who is considering whether to attend in person to think carefully about the risks and benefits before registering. Due to social distancing measures, the number of Inquiry participants, recognised legal representatives, and media who can attend will be significantly lower than in previous hearings. 

You can register to attend the first three weeks’ hearing sessions here. We are asking people to do this by Friday 4 September where possible so that we can confirm seats.

The detailed timetable for subsequent weeks is not available yet because obtaining finalised witness statements has been made more complex a process than it would otherwise have been due to the pandemic.

However, we have updated the indicative timetable to give you the best idea we can of some of the witnesses and presentations we hope to hear, and when. You can read it here. We will provide further updates on our website as soon as more information is available.

As soon as witness statements are available in their final form, they will be disclosed to core participants to enable them and their legal representatives to prepare for the hearings. As has been the case with previous witnesses, their statements will be published on the website when each gives evidence, so that those who are not core participants may read them.

Chair of the Inquiry, Sir Brian Langstaff, said:

“Covid-19 has cast its shadow over almost everything for the past six months. It threatened to delay the progress of the Inquiry. I was determined the Inquiry should press on, working every bit as hard, and should lose as little time as possible. But it was important to take your views about the hearings into account. So the Inquiry consulted you on how best to proceed. You not only agreed with this approach, but added some useful suggestions. Thank you.

These hearings will undoubtedly feel different. Many of you will prefer to participate online. Those of you who in normal times would have wanted to be in the hearing room may hesitate or feel unable to come. Whatever you choose, I hope you will continue to feel involved.      

The virus makes it more difficult to plan with certainty. Though we hope to publish more detail about the hearings soon, it is to be expected that the pandemic will mean changes at short notice.

Everyone involved – Inquiry participants, witnesses, and legal representatives – has been understanding, and patient. More understanding and patience is likely to be needed: may I thank you for it, in anticipation. Together we shall continue to make progress.”

Two further experts have been put forward to join the Infected Blood Inquiry’s psychosocial group to provide expertise on fertility for the group’s supplementary report. 

The nominees will provide independent expertise to inform the Inquiry’s understanding of the psychosocial impact on those infected and affected.

The nominees to the psychosocial group can be found here.

Sir Brian Langstaff, Chair of the Infected Blood Inquiry, has written to all core participants outlining the Inquiry’s approach to holding safe hearings during the coronavirus pandemic. 

The Inquiry postponed hearings in June and July this year to hear evidence from clinicians and others who could shed light on the policies and practices of haemophilia centres across the UK. Subject to the course of the pandemic and government guidance, the Inquiry is now working towards holding those hearings at Fleetbank House this autumn. 

In his letter, Sir Brian says:

“It goes without saying that any hearings we hold in line with the guidance to protect us all from coronavirus will feel very different. But waiting for the public health context to change would result in considerable delay which I cannot justify in light of the length of time many have already waited for the answers this Inquiry is tasked to deliver.” 

Sir Brian asks core participants to share their views by Wednesday 24 June.

You can read Sir Brian’s letter here.

Although it is not possible for us to meet in person, we want to continue with the local meetings we have held for people infected and affected across the UK. This will be a learning experience for us all, and we plan to start by making these meetings local to help you maintain connections made at previous meetings, as well as hear about the Inquiry’s work.

That is why we are asking you to register for the location nearest to your home.  We will be using a system for these meetings which allows you to join either through video by using your tablet, laptop or smartphone, or if it suits you better, to join from your landline phone.  

As this is new for us, we are starting small with 15 registrations (one for a household) because this should allow everyone taking part to ask questions. We expect to learn from experience and anticipate that we may need to add in extra meetings or increase the number of registrations as we go along. 

Locations and Dates: 

You can register your interest in attending by completing a response form or contact us for more details.

Once you have registered, the Inquiry team will be in touch with detailed instructions on how to join the meeting. 

The Chair of the Infected Blood Inquiry, Sir Brian Langstaff, has replied to the Paymaster General’s confirmation of her appointment as sponsor Minister. 

Noting that the Inquiry is a priority for the Government and for the Minister personally, Sir Brian welcomed her commitment to act on issues of pressing concern to participants in the Inquiry.  He says that it remains the case that the majority of people infected and affected do not have access to dedicated psychological support and that financial hardships continue.

In his letter Sir Brian says:

“It is not easy to expose intimate details of one’s life to public gaze.  I have asked [people infected and affected] to take all the risks of doing so, in the interests of the Inquiry.  You will understand then why it is that I feel a particular sense of responsibility for ensuring that the support is there for them, on a professional and long term basis, not only to assist in dealing with the problems of the past but with the added pressures that participating in the Inquiry will have brought to bear on them.  I hope that with ministerial colleagues in the four nations you are able to cut through whatever problems have prevented greater progress to date.”

You can read the letters below.

Letter from the Paymaster General Penny Mordaunt MP

Letter in response from Sir Brian Langstaff

We have today (Thursday 30th April) published our latest financial report which details the Inquiry’s annual expenditure for the 2019-20 financial year, up to 31 March 2020.

The report details that the Inquiry spent £25.987millon in 2019-20, up from £9.308million in 2018-19 and bringing total spending to date to £35.295million. This increase in costs reflects the Inquiry beginning its full hearings in April 2019, along with significant escalation of the Inquiry’s investigative work and a significant increase in legal costs.

The Inquiry’s investigation was the biggest item of expenditure at £8.85million, up from £2.18million in 2018-19. As of 31 March 2020, 277 solicitors, investigators and paralegals were reviewing millions of historical documents over multiple decades, making the Infected Blood Inquiry the largest public inquiry investigation of its kind.

The second biggest item of expenditure was legal fees paid to representatives of core participants funded through the Inquiry at £5.74million, up from £2.52million in 2018-19. 

The third biggest item of expenditure was the cost of the Inquiry’s public hearings at £4.29million, up from £0.98million in 2018-19. In 2019-20 the Inquiry held hearings in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast and Leeds, as well as a significant number of witness and expert hearings at the Inquiry hearing room in London.

The full report can be found here.

A core participant client of Collins Solicitors has issued judicial review proceedings against a procedural decision of the Chair of the Inquiry, Sir Brian Langstaff, choosing one of the two courses open to him in law by which a dispute over the assessment of a monthly costs award can be resolved. We filed paperwork today (22 April 2020) in the Administrative Court outlining why we do not accept this challenge.

Judicial review is a type of court proceeding in which a judge reviews the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body, or the way it was made. The first step in judicial review proceedings is a process which assesses whether claims have any reasonable prospect of success: it is only if a judge grants permission that a claim can then go further. The core participant is currently seeking such permission. 

We have today (Tuesday 7th April) published the report of the Inquiry’s Expert Group on Medical Ethics.

The 130-page report discusses the ethical principles that should govern and inform clinical decision-making. It was commissioned primarily to inform the Inquiry’s questioning of clinicians in future hearings.

The report is based on letters of instruction given to the Group by the Inquiry which had input from core participants. Many of the questions and responses relate to general medical ethics and are not necessarily specific to issues of infected blood and blood products, hepatitis, HIV or blood and bleeding disorders. 

The Expert Group has chosen to structure its report in six sections to cover all the questions in the letters of instructions.

The six sections are:

1. General and introductory questions 

2. Questions relating to the treatment of patients

3. Questions on testing for infection

4. Questions on informing people of infections

5. Questions on the ethics of research

6. Other questions put by the Inquiry not captured above

The Inquiry Chair, Sir Brian Langstaff, appointed experts across a range of specialisms last year, as leaders in their various fields, to provide independent expertise to the Inquiry in a way that is clear and transparent. The experts were asked to explain in their reports what is now known and considered as best practice and how that has come about, and not to give an opinion on what a clinician at a previous time either knew or did, or ought to have known and done. It is for the Inquiry Chair to determine what happened and why with infected blood and blood products, and the expert reports help to inform the Inquiry’s work. 

Participants are invited to consider the report in their own time ahead of the Inquiry’s hearings with clinicians (currently set to resume in September 2020) and to provide any feedback they may have to their legal representatives or, if unrepresented, to the Inquiry.

The report can be read here.

More details about the Inquiry’s Expert Groups, including their membership, the letters of instruction and previous reports published by other groups, can be found here.