Prison Mental Health Programme

The Prison Mental Health is about mainstreaming all the general Mental Health developments into prisons. Following on from Changing the Outlook there have been significant developments around implementing Prison mental Health In-Reach teams and developing clinical networks to make small improvements in clinical services. In August 2003 the Development and Modernisation of Prison Mental health Services was transferred to NIMHE under the leadership of Sean Duggan.

Ultimately the main aim of the programme is to improve the quality of mental health care delivered to our prison population. The time is right for us to mainstream all the work we do in Prison Mental Health into the NHS and there is considerable passion within the workforce to do this. It is vital that prisons are an integral part of all the work programmes within NIMHE and that we make progress in ensuring that the service user is at the heart of everything we do.

This is an exciting programme with much work to do and with a team of extremely dedicated staff to deliver it.

Programme priorities

• Developing In-Reach
• Rolling out a Prison Mental Health Collaborative
• Assessing and treating our most dangerous prisoners
• Mainstraeaming our prison mental health work into the general mental health work
• Developing a guidance document for mental health practitioners
• Building up the capacity to deliver, both centrally and through the development centres
• Integrate the work with the National Treatment Agency and Prison Mental Health through NIMHE.

Programme organisation

A detailed programme has been developed with some resources used for central projects and some allocated to local developent centres to improve the services within prisons. The programme is hosted by the South East Development Centre, whose Director, Richard Ford, chairs the Programme Board.

The Programme Board includes representation from:

• Service users
• Prison Health
• NIMHE
• Safer Custody
• Probation
• Development Centre leads

A performance monitoring system has been established with monthly reports of all the milestones within the programme.