Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 2
2
The pandemic has significantly impacted the wellbeing and life chances of prisoners, making it critical...
Recommendation
The pandemic has significantly impacted the wellbeing and life chances of prisoners, making it critical that the Ministry and HMPPS accelerate their work to improve the mental health of prisoners. The need for restrictive regimes to maintain social distancing in prisons during the pandemic has exacerbated the existing mental health challenges that prisoners face. In 2019–20, the incidents of self-harm in prisons remained high, particularly in the female prisoner population. We welcome HMPPS’ work to specifically address the issues facing female prisoners, including maintaining family contact and one-to-one counselling support. It is vital that HMPPS continues to learn lessons from how it manages the impact of the pandemic on prisoner wellbeing and that it sustains this work in the long term. We are encouraged by HMPPS’s commitment to improve its work with others, including the Samaritans and CLINKS. Recommendation: In its Treasury Minute response to this report, the Ministry and HMPPS should set out what progress they have made with the initiatives they put in place to support prisoner mental health since the beginning of the pandemic and the impact this has had on those in prison.
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
agree with the conclusion that DHSC and NHS Digital took too long to identify all clinically extremely vulnerable people. Given the data available at the time, and the novelty of shielding policy, NHS Digital, DHSC, and frontline clinicians worked as quickly as possible to identify CEV people at the start of the pandemic. However, the government is committed to learning the lessons from this process to improve how national data is used to identify at risk groups in the future. 2.3 Work is already underway on this. NHS Digital has developed a strategic national GP dataset alongside the profession. This will allow faster access to GP information that will be more regularly updated and more complete than current data sources. NHSX and NHS Digital are also working together on plans to digitise the health service and to deliver comprehensive shared care records. 2.4 The above developments will be set out in a data strategy for health and social care that the government will shortly publish in draft. The strategy will contain a number of additional commitments reducing or removing structural, technical and cultural barriers, to enable quick and secure access to patient data where appropriate.