Health Services: Prisoners

(asked on 21st October 2021) - View Source

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 support (a) research into and (b) monitoring of avoidable health outcomes for prisoners.


Answered by
Gillian Keegan Portrait
Gillian Keegan
Secretary of State for Education
This question was answered on 29th October 2021

The Department is funding, through the National Institute for Health Research, the ‘Understanding the scale and nature of avoidable harm in prison healthcare’ research project. This aims to identify the scale of avoidable harm in prison healthcare and understand which policies or processes could minimise the risk of this in the future. The project is currently due to complete in May 2023.

NHS England and NHS Improvement’s health and justice and health and inequalities teams are considering how the national Core20PLUS5 health inequalities survey for National Health Service professionals could be applied to prison settings. This will contribute to the monitoring and reduction of differences in health outcomes across priority areas such as maternal health, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and early cancer detection. In addition, the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcomes and Death will undertake a review of natural cause deaths of people who died whilst detained in prison.

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