Monitoring hepatitis C in Australian prisons

The National Prisons Hepatitis Network (NPHN), alongside the Kirby Institute at UNSW, leads research and advocacy for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases among people in prison, including efforts to eliminate hepatitis C. Its surveillance program had collected extensive data on hepatitis C in prisons.

The challenge was to take this detailed, science-heavy surveillance data and make it understandable and meaningful for a wide range of stakeholders (researchers, clinicians, policymakers and the public) without compromising scientific rigour.

The existing reports were static, spreadsheet-based and time-consuming to update. The team needed a solution that could communicate trends clearly across nine key focus areas, serve both scientific and general audiences, be embedded into the NPHN website, and allow seamless quarterly updates without external developer support.

We delivered the work in ten structured phases, from discovery workshops through to public launch and training. We began with a project team workshop to clarify goals and user needs, then developed draft metrics, low-fidelity wireframes and a consistent visual language including a colour palette and icon set.

The dashboards were reviewed not only internally but by a panel of external stakeholders, whose input helped ensure the content was both scientifically accurate and genuinely accessible.

We transformed the raw surveillance spreadsheets into a clean, dashboard-ready format and built a Tableau data model supporting dynamic filtering, tooltips and responsive interactivity.

We developed nine detailed dashboards plus a high-level infographic summary, published on Tableau Public and embedded into the NPHN website.

Finally, we built a clear quarterly update protocol and ran training sessions with the Kirby team so they could maintain the dashboards independently going forward.

The NPHN Surveillance Dashboard is now live and publicly accessible, bringing greater transparency to hepatitis C surveillance in prisons and setting a new benchmark for how epidemiological data can be communicated.

Policymakers and researchers now have a clear, interactive view of key trends, improving stakeholder engagement.

The manual workload of quarterly updates has been replaced with a repeatable, scalable process, and the public-facing dashboard supports Australia's broader commitment to health equity and disease elimination.

As project lead Andrew Lloyd, Kirby Institute and NPHN Chair, put it, the work produced "a series of very well accepted interactive dashboards which have set a new standard for our organisation."