In this week's blog, a quick chance to share some of the information about what this means for the offender healthcare.

The RCN has identified that in the NHS 10,000 jobs would go, from recruitment freezes, not replacing retiring staff and redundancies. HM Treasury highlights about 500,000 jobs to go in the public sector, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development feels this is an underestimate and 750,000 jobs will go. (See here)

We are working on a 0% flat cash approach to prison health budgets, taking into account the staff pay freeze, drug costs increase and other external cost increases this will be a budget cut in real terms.

All I can urge you to do, is to think and take action now, procrastinating until another day could make the changes you will have to make even greater.

Working in healthcare it is important to have good numeracy skills, when prescribing, administrating and recording information in patient files. Why not spend 10minutes and click on to this site and check your numeracy skills, 20 questions, it won't take long...

I undertook the tablet dose quiz. 18 out of 20 from me. Probably shows why I am not a clinician. The site provides a whole range of quizzes and support, you can access the wider site here.

Joking aside, numeracy skills are important and it is always worth checking that our skills are up to date.

Somedays we forget about the day job and concentrate on new developments, if I could choose what to see, each day in prison health, I would like to see people doing the day job well, all day, every day, not flying off to the next crisis.

Last week we drafted a report on the benefits of the introduction into prison of the computer based patient management system. We looked at what we had achieved in the roll-out across the West Midlands, what we had spent on the roll-out and the benefits we had identified.

There has been a lot of negative comments about the NHS computerisation of records and patient management. Our report potentially bucks this trend.

We have estimated that for five of our 12 prisons, the NHS has reduced the equivalent of £148,000 a year of staff time spent on administration.

In prison nursing, the introduction of the computer based system, has improved the management of clinics, reduced the amount of paperwork that nurses have had to complete and supported the sharing of information between prisons as prisoners are moved between sites.

We are not suggesting that we have saved the NHS the equivalent staffing, more that we have been able to divert staff time used in administration to front line patient care.

If we were to extrapolate the figures, this could deliver savings of £439,000 across all West Midlands Prison healthcare centres and extrapolated across all prisons in England and Wales this could equate to £5.1 million.

Our estimates are based on reductions in staff time spent on administration, freeing up time for more clinics, for more patient face to face contact and a reduction in prescribing practices as information is now held in one central IT record, rather than paper based.

Demonstrating the benefits is going to be critical, while some talk about the NHS being free from budget cuts, we expect no inflation rise next year, we are being asked to focus more on front-line services.

Currently, just over 12 months into implementation in the region, the IT system, appears to be supporting this.

We'll upload the full document as soon as we have gone through the final checks.

Working in West Midlands' Prisons, is the working title of our draft workforce report, produced in partnership with regional NHS stakeholders, NOMS, and private sector providers of prison health and substance misuse services.  When complete in September, we will publish the report on our website. 

As you can imagine, from previous posts, the issue of change and delivering services in a different way  is something I am personally involved in. (See blog post Statement on the Future..)  Some initial analysis from our workforce report, shows that there are big differences in the workforce composition between community healthcare and prison healthcare.

Our analysis shows in the community there is 1 Health Care Assistant (HCA)  to every 1.35 nurses, in prison 1 HCA to every 3.57 nurses.  1 administrator to every 1.19 nurses in the community, in prison 1 administrator to every 5.63 nurses.  In prison adult and general nurses make up 50% of the healthcare workforce, in the community just 10%.

Is prison health making the best use of the range of skills and support available in a modern healthcare workforce? 

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