Anyone working in the justice sector will have found the latest annual report of the prisons inspectorate a difficult read.
We all want to improve outcomes and help with the core task of reducing reoffending. The findings of the report - rising violence and self-harm, low levels of purposeful activity, unsatisfactory efforts at rehabilitation – are a reminder of how much there is to do.
For our team, the findings on healthcare and rehabilitation were of particular interest.
Prison healthcare is under pressure. Vacancy rates for healthcare staff are “high” and there are “chronic issues” with recruitment and retention. Many prisons did not have an adequate number of clinical staff to deliver effective care, particularly in regard to mental health and the safe provision of medicines. The inspectorate raised concerns with medicines practices and oversight at 14 prisons and the Care Quality Commission issued seven regulatory notices specific to medicines in prisons in England. In contrast, one characteristic of successful prisons is that they make good use of data, including healthcare data.
Work to reduce the risk of reoffending was “not good enough”. The inspectorate judged purposeful activity to be poor or not sufficiently good in 31 of the 39 adult prisons inspected this year. Prisons often did not fulfil their vital role in preparing prisoners coming to the end of their sentence for return to the community, with weaknesses in resettlement provision and support for family relationships. The chief inspector of prison summarised his concerns by saying:
“Most jails already fail to give prisoners enough to do and population increases are likely to make things worse. If prisoners leave prison without having learnt the skills and habits that will help them to hold down a job, if they are not being taught to read, if they are being sold drugs without support to break their addiction and if they continue to live in environments in which violence is commonplace, prisons will fail in their duty to prevent future reoffending.”
All of this strengthens our motivation to help health and justice professionals meet their goals through improved information systems. SONAR has been designed to support easy information entry and reference, helping prison staff provide accurate interventions including medicines.
As I described in our recent blog on the latest early release scheme, SONAR will provide additional support post-release. It will help offenders find jobs by providing an appointment diary. It will inform all relevant agencies, and key family members, if appointments are missed – which can also be an important risk factor.
What the annual report shows is that prisons, and prisoners, do not exist in isolation. They are part of a wider system, receiving prisoners from custody and preparing them for release, which itself is under pressure. That is why we have built SONAR to be the first integrated health information for criminal justice, able to link the system’s component parts. We look forward to working with custodial staff across the United Kingdom and Ireland.
John White
CEO & Founder
Comments