Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the report entitled Injustice? Towards a better understanding of health care access challenges for prisoners, published by Nuffield Trust on 21 October 2021, what steps he is taking to improve the collection of ethnicity data for prisoners using healthcare services in England.

The NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSEI) prison health data system ‘SystmOne’ already collects and holds ethnicity data for prisoners. NHSEI regularly review the data fields to ensure they are accurate and appropriate and provide quality audits and reports for internal use by commissioners.

From 2022 clinical records will work across a General Practitioner (GP) to GP system which will support a swift reconciliation of client data including ethnicity, as people transfer from community services into custodial settings and from custody back into the community.