Source · Select Committees · Justice Committee
Recommendation 29
29
Deferred
Paragraph: 153
Require MoJ, HMPPS, NHSE/I to set out work improving prison healthcare and accessibility.
Recommendation
It is concerning that issues relating to healthcare continue to be a contributing factor to deaths in custody. The MoJ, HMPPS and NHSE/I should set out what work they are doing to: • improve communications between staff across all disciplines in prisons; • improve the response to medical emergencies; and • improve drug management processes. We welcome both the Women’s Review, and the National Mental Health Needs Analysis, which will provide a greater understanding of physical and mental health needs, existing service provision and gaps in service provision. We were concerned to hear that demand for services may be greater than the available provision and that waiting lists are growing, in part due to the pandemic. NHSE/I should also set out the work it is doing (aside from both reviews), to reduce existing waiting lists, and increase service accessibility.
Government Response Summary
The government accepted the recommendation but focused its response on improvements in data collection for learning difficulties, educational attainment (exploring gender breakdown in Autumn 2022), and care experience (publishing guidance in Oct 2022 and a research project until Jan 2023), rather than addressing the requested improvements in staff communications, medical emergency response, drug management, or efforts to reduce healthcare waiting lists.
Paragraph Reference:
153
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
We accept this recommendation. MoJ and HMPPS use CURIOUS, a data management tool facilitating the management of contracts, to capture data, including from the women’s estate. It includes details such as initial assessments, courses undertaken and the outcomes of those courses. We are expanding the use of CURIOUS and developing our approach to capturing data around a full range of learning difficulties and disabilities (LDD) and additional learning needs across the prison estate. Where appropriate a prisoners individual personal learning record (PLR) can also be accessed to find data on prisoners’ prior educational attainment. We published data on prisoners’ education assessment and achievement in August 2021 (Prison Education Statistics 2019–2020). We will explore the potential to breakdown relevant excerpts of this data by gender as part of the next planned data release in Autumn 2022. A further publication is planned for 2023 which will set out prison performance ratings against new education metrics that cover: attendance; progress in English and maths and vocational qualification success rates. In addition, work through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) programme, which will run until March 2024, will seek to derive new insights into the link between employment, education (including school exclusion) and reoffending, to explore the impact of education and employment on post release outcomes and how this differs for different cohorts, including women. Work is currently ongoing to improve data on prisoners with care experience. To create a safe environment for prisoners to share their care experience, we have dedicated leads in every prison to help identify and support prisoners belonging to this cohort and have recently created a bespoke guidance leaflet for prison and probation staff, which will be published at the end of October to coincide with Care Experienced Week 2022, an annual awareness initiative. Additionally, a research project is currently in progress, in association with Lancaster University, looking at linked MoJ/DfE data, to explore the intersections between ethnicity, care experience and criminal justice systems involvement. The project is due to run until January 2023.