The prison population has soared in the last decade and a significant proportion of those who end up in prison have a mental health problem.
Responsibility for prison health care lies with the NHS. It aims to give prisoners access to the same quality and range of health care services as the general public receives in the community.
Service user involvement in research is important as it allows researchers to develop more appropriate questions, use more appropriate methods and ultimately find more relevant results.
The involvement of service users in prison health research is less developed. This project will describe the their experience of involvement in prison health research, successful models of involvement and specific challenges there are in this type of research.
This project is being conducted with the Prison Health Research Network. The results will be published later this year. For more information, contact Chiara Samele or Grahan Durcan.
The King's Fund Enhancing the Healing Environment (EHE) programme is designed to encourage and enable people to improve the environment in which they deliver care. It has two main elements:
For further information about the EHE programme please visit www.kingsfund.org.uk
In 2007, the King's Fund, with the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) and Offender Health, Department of Health, extended the EHE programme to a pilot group of five HM Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions in London.
We hope that the London pilot programme will not only improve the environment in which health services are provided but also establish new ways of consultation with service users; enable the review of current therapeutic regimes; support further engagement of PCTs in prison health services; provide personal development opportunities for staff; and promote multidisciplinary working.
Sainsbury Centre is undertaking an evaluation of the pilot programme. For further details please contact Laura Thorne.
The King's Fund, in partnership with the Sainsbury Centre, is conducting the first EHE exercise with the prison service. Five London prisons are taking part.
The prisons will form teams from various disciplines to redesign part of the health care environment to improve the mental wellbeing of prisoners, which will also have 'knock-on' effects for other parts of mental health care and prison culture.
We are conducting an independent evaluation of this project, which will be completed in Summer 2008. For more information, contact Grahan Durcan.
The Mental Health Act does not apply to prison so staff cannot compel prisoners to take treatment, therefore transfers to hospital need to be efficient and rapid.
There is a national 2 year pilot programme to address the unacceptable delays in transferring prisoners to the NHS. Delays are very common; up to a maximum of two years has been recorded and it is not unusual for a transfer to take three months.
Although the pilot is achieving good results in some areas (reducing waiting times to 2 weeks), this is not happening in London.
We will conduct a review of the situation in London and describe the costs of delayed transfers, which are believed to be significant. Our aim is to influence government to apply the good practice developing in other parts of the country to the transfer process in London.
We are collaborating with CSIP to develop evidence-based ways of supporting the mental health needs of offenders throughout the criminal justice system.
We will simulate new ways of working by mapping the offender pathway through the system and investigating the impact that existing evidence on best practice and local expert feedback are having.
This will identify a number of areas for piloting and evaluating. We will carry out a few pilot projects, each concerned with a different part of the care pathway. These will look at new ways of working with offenders to meet their needs but also to reduce offending.
For more information, contact Graham Durcan.