Records key to prison health action plan

The government has pledged to improve the quality of data, records and information sharing for offenders as part of its action plan on offender health.

The cross-government plan, launched this week by care services minister Phil Hope, aims to address the health inequalities faced by offenders in prison and in the community.

The report acknowledges that people in the criminal justice system often experience significant problems accessing adequate health and social care, even though they are much more likely than average to suffer from mental illnesses, personality disorders and substance misuse.

The plan, Improving Health, Supporting Justice, identifies information management as a key tool for delivering system reform in offender health.

It acknowledges that the focus to date has been on the management of a programme to deliver a single clinical IT system across the prison estate but adds: “We now need to take these early objectives to a much more ambitious level.”

The plan says Offender Health’s IM&T project aims to deliver tools and support to improve the continuity of care across the criminal justice pathway.

Key milestones set by the action plan include: incorporating substance misuse outcomes and quality metrics into the prison health IT system by March next year; integrating all drug treatment activities into the prison health IT system by April 2010; and working with NHS Connecting for Health to ensure optimal use of IT systems, with initial work to be completed by October 2010.

Hope said mental health problems could lock people into a cycle of disadvantage and criminality. He added: “In many cases the criminal justice system is our best chance of providing help for those who may otherwise drift off the radar.”

TPP’s SystmOne Prison was selected last year as the national clinical system for prisons. A session at E-Health Insider Live ’09 last week heard that 69 prisons in the North, Midlands and East are now live with the system – making up 80% of prisons in the cluster – plus ten prisons in London and the South.

Susan Wishart, business change support manager for HM Prison Service, said the availability of a single electronic record system was transforming care for prisoners with 400,000 annual prisoner movements between prisons which were previously backed by paper transfer of records.