Prison healthcare - improving quality and access

In this presentation, Dr Laura Sheard, Associate Professor, University of York, Honorary Principal Research Fellow, Bradford Institute for Health Research, will talk about the importance of prison healthcare, how it can be improved and why she is passionate about this topic. Laura will draw on her own experience of the four years she worked in HMP Leeds alongside findings from several mixed methods studies that Laura led in particular “Qual-P” which focused on understanding and improving the quality of and access to everyday primary care in prisons in the North of England. A large part of the presentation will discuss the major factors which influence the quality of primary care. These are: chronic understaffing; high variability of quality between sites, little to no quality measurement; excessive Did Not Attend rate; community-prison interface incompatibility including IT systems and opioid prescribing; facilitative relationships between healthcare staff and patients.

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