Key Health Care Issues for Women in Prison

[EmbarrassingHadrosaurus]

I'm pleased to see that the Health Foundation has done this work.

Davies M, Hutchings R and Keeble E (2022) Inequality on the inside: Using hospital data to understand the key health care issues for women in prison. Report, Nuffield Trust.

All prisoners have a right to receive the same standard of health care as people in the general population, irrespective of the situation in which they are currently living. Women in prison have distinct health care needs, and with the government recently committing to building 500 new prison places for female prisoners, getting a full understanding of how effectively health care is being provided for women in prison is vital.

We find that that pregnant women in prison are almost twice as likely to go into preterm labour compared to the general population. Prisons and those staffing them have not been well equipped to deal with these challenges, potentially putting both mother and baby at significant risk if they are unable to reach the hospital in time.

Our work also finds that more than a fifth of midwifery appointments are being missed by pregnant prisoners, with a key reason for missed appointments being a lack of available escort staff.

We have also collated data on the number of women in prison with children under the age of two. As data has not been routinely collected, it is very unclear whether this group and their children are receiving adequate support. Our figures suggest the capacity of mother and baby units throughout the prison estate in England could be overwhelmed if everyone who was eligible or would benefit from them were using them. While not all women will be able to go to mother and baby units, it is important to understand current need and demand and to project into the future to make sure capacity is sufficient and facilities are appropriate.

www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/research/inequality-on-the-inside-using-hospital-data-to-understand-the-key-health-care-issues-for-women-in-prison

It's a good report and ranges across a range of women's healthcare needs.

Thank you embarassing for posting this.

Twice as likely to go into preterm labour? Bloody hell, that's bad.

I read that (on here, I think) a lot of women in jail have head injuries. Like, more than half. This is awful reading, wirh that knowledge too

… inflicted head injuries from the violent men they live with.

I'd quite like less women in prison in the first place, and the impact of the men that put them there to be considered before building new prison places.

I'd like no women to be in prison for even one day for not paying a TV licence fine. It costs more than the TV licence to house them let alone the legal work to get them to prison in the first place.

I'd quite like there to be the facilities that women in prison need, so appropriate healthcare from the get go, not mirroring the male estate in any way.

It is all such a mess, men go free for much more heinus crimes than women and the whole rotten business needs an overhaul - not that any of that it likely to happen in any way.

pregnant women are missing midwife appointments due to lack of staff? that's so shit

my (tory) MP is surprisingly enlightened on the subject of women in prison, but I think I'll drop him an email to draw this report to his attention

The Disabilities Trust (2019) found that nearly two thirds of the 174 women it
surveyed at HM Prison/Young Offender Institution Drake Hall had a history
that suggested they had experienced a brain injury and that this was often the
result of domestic abuse.
We spoke to our stakeholders about the health care needs of women in prison
with a brain injury. They told us that screening for and the identification of
brain injuries were often poor and that, as a result, they would not necessarily
expect to see these women present at hospital purely as a result of a head
injury, even though they may be experiencing symptoms.
…
Our stakeholders also suggested that the symptoms of brain injuries can
often be attributed to other things, such as mental health care needs, and
in particular personality disorders. They made the point that if women have
experienced domestic abuse in the past and a partner has called their mental
health into question, they may not attribute symptoms to a historical head
injury. We found that there were 102 hospital admissions by 67 women with a
diagnosis of specific personality disorders. If symptoms are misattributed to
other things (prisoners are often described as being ‘challenging’) this may
result in women being treated punitively or unfairly.

Extract from pp 32-33 of full report.

I'm rather chilled by the impact that a partner questioning mental health has. I'm not entirely clear if this is the partner undermining the woman and attempting to minimise the impact of the assault or something else.

AlisonDonut, no women have been imprisoned in the last two years for failure to pay the fine for non possession of a tv licence. And nobody was ever imprisoned for not having a licence, they were just fined.