17 November2016

For immediate release

Healthcare at HMP Winchester praised in inspection, but acknowledgement more needs to be done

A joint inspection on Winchester Prison has reported positive findings of its Primary Care, Substance Misuse, and Mental Health services, which are provided by CNWL.

The announced inspection, which was carried out in July, found the "quality of health services to be good overall" with an "appropriate range of primary care services" and an "increase in therapeutic care on the unit".

The report praised an initiative with local GPs that highlighted prescribing issues among patients who might later enter a secure environment.

It said this promoted "awareness of key issues linked to inappropriate prescribing patterns of tradable medicines, promoted continuity of care and appropriate prescribing practices between the prison and community."

Marta Pitarch, CNWL's Advanced Specialist Pharmacist at HMP Winchester, said: "Our Primary Care and Substance Misuse Team had noticed an increase of prisoners on inappropriate abusable medication (such as pregabalin, tramadol and other opioid based medicine).

"In most cases, the misuse started with prescribing in primary care services within the community. A big area of concern in the prison was identifying patients that had inappropriate prescribing patterns from community GPs, addressing this while in prison by changing their prescription to a non-addictive and tradable alternative medication only to return to the GP in the community and obtain a similar prescription of the abusable medication.

"Through the Winchester Medicine Management group we were offered an opportunity to highlight these issues to the local Community GPs, which included how to manage these patients using the Prescribing Review Group which is a multidisciplinary group including Doctors, Pharmacists, and Non Medical Prescribers (NMPs)."

While there have been five self-inflicted deaths in custody since the previous inspection with the number of self-harm incidents having increased, the report did say, "there was a health care improvement plan based on lessons learnt from the deaths in custody".

The report added that not all clinical rooms were compliant with infection control requirements, with damaged or inappropriate fixtures and fittings, and some did not meet NHS cleaning standards.

Divisional Director of Nursing Jo Haworth said: "I'm proud of the staff for the hard work they have done and the excellent care they have provided to patients as well the innovations they have brought about.

"We recognise there are things to do and we are working with the healthcare team and our partners to address the infection prevention and control issues which have been identified. We are committed to addressing this in a sustained way, in order to be able to provide the standard of care that all our patients deserve."

The report is available on https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/11/HMP-Winchester-Web-2016.pdf

Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust
Stephenson House, 75 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2PL
Tel: 020 3214 5756 e-mail:communications.cnwl@nhs.net