Welcome to our community offender health pages. These pages contain all our information about improving provision and performance in community healthcare services for offender.
We have included specific pages that will support:
- Provision of Place of Safety, under Section 135/136 of the Mental Health Act. This page has a template for commissioners, a monitoring tool for the implementation of a Place of Safety and an example operational managament template. Everything you need to support you commission, project manage and operate a place of safety.
- Criminal Justice Liaison Services, are services that support the identification and support of people in contact with the criminal justice system who may have mental health needs. This page provides an outline template and more information about our work in this area.
All of these pages have a host of resources that you can download, adapt and use. If you think we are missing some resources then do contact us and let us know, if you have some resources you would like to share with others, do send them along, we will be happy to host them. The best way to contact us is by e-mailing us, details on the About Us page.
Supporting Women with Complex Needs
We have published a report from a partnership project that was initiated to acknowledge the difficulties for women who have a range of complex needs and look at their access to appropriate mental health services.
The group of women identified were those in attendance at a Women’s centre called ‘Anawim’ in Birmingham. You can access the report here. The report details the reasons for this particular piece of work, the ‘partnership’, our achievements, the actions taken and the outcomes identified. It also identifies some recommendations that could inform the future thinking, planning and design of services aimed at ensuring the equality of access and outcome for this marginalised group of women.
Supporting Women with Mental Health Needs
We have a joint collaboration between the following Women’s Community Projects all of whom are based within the West Midlands:
Anawim (Balsall Heath and Handsworth centres) Asha, Asha Wyre Forest, Chepstow House (part of Brighter Futures), Here4Women & YWCA Bilston. These groups have worked in partnership with ourselves and the National Offender Management Service.
We have produced a report that outlines the effectiveness of the support provided by the women’s community projects for women identified with mental health needs. The women identified have attended the women’s community projects within the West Midlands region. The report shows the added value that women's community projects can add to supporting women with mental health needs.
This report would be of use to commissioners of services, other community organisations and to statutory providers who are interested in considering other ways to provide a holistic service to women with mental health needs. We should point out that although we are interested in supporting the work of these women's community projects to ensure women offenders are included, the projects support all women, not just those in contact with the criminal justice system. You can access the report here.
Provision in Police Stations
The previous government and indicated that they were looking at the potential to transfer commissioning from the Police to the NHS for all healthcare activity with detainees and others to the NHS. This is very similar to the transfer of prison health from the Prison Service to the NHS in 2003/4.
Currently no decision has been made, we expect that once the outcomes of this government's comprehensive spending review is known, Ministers will be in a position to make an in-principle decision on the way forward.
Colleagues in London have published their Profile Report on Police Detainees and Offenders in London. This builds on the National Offender Management Service London "Borough Offender Profile Report' to present activity, volumes, demographic information and needs for people subject to police, court, prison and probation processes in the capital. The annexes to this report are availble here.
We'll add more information to this site when we have it.
Alcohol
Our resources that support the improvement in alcohol interventions operate across prisons and the community, for information and advice about alcohol please click here.
Information Sharing
We are often asked about information sharing protocols, our recommendation is that there are normally sufficient protocols already in place between organisations to enable the sharing of information. The issues that arise with information sharing are normally because the person asking and the person responding are not fully aware of exisiting protocols. At times like this we refer people to the Safe and Secure flowchart, produced by the Department of Health with agreement from criminal justice organisations. This flowchart can be found here.