World AIDS Day 2025

World AIDS Day: Standing Together for Fairness, Dignity, and Compassionate Care

On World AIDS Day, we join communities around the world to recognise the ongoing impact of HIV, to stand alongside those living with the virus, and to remember the many lives lost to AIDS-related illnesses. It is a day that invites reflection, honesty, and a renewed commitment to fairness in healthcare.

Even with enormous medical progress, many people still face barriers, stigma, inequality, and limited access to consistent care. These challenges are often felt most sharply by people in vulnerable circumstances, including those within the justice system. This is why awareness, understanding, and collective action remain as important as ever.

 

Supporting Healthcare Professionals to Provide Fair, Inclusive Care

Behind every care pathway is a dedicated team of healthcare professionals working to ensure that individuals living with HIV are treated with dignity, respect, and compassion. Their work is complex, often carried out under considerable pressure, and shaped by the realities of environments where continuity can be difficult to maintain.

At SONAR CMS, our role is not to lead the clinical conversation, but to support those who do. By helping healthcare teams access the information they need, when they need it, we aim to create conditions where:

• Every person receives fair and consistent treatment, no matter their background or circumstances.

• Transitions between services do not interrupt care, reducing the risk of people falling through the cracks.

• Care decisions can be made with clarity and confidence, grounded in accurate and timely information.

• Healthcare professionals feel supported, not burdened, by the systems around them.

This isn’t about technology for its own sake; it is about enabling people to care for people.

Why Awareness Still Matters

While treatment today is highly effective and prevention tools continue to evolve, stigma remains one of the most significant barriers to care. Misinformation, fear, and assumptions can stop individuals from seeking testing, treatment, or support.

Raising awareness helps us:

• Normalise conversations about HIV, reducing the weight of stigma.

• Improve understanding of modern treatment, including the reality that people on effective therapy cannot pass on the virus.

• Encourage early testing, which remains one of the most powerful tools in preventing late diagnoses.

• Support vulnerable communities, whose voices and experiences are essential in shaping equitable care.

Awareness is not a one-day activity, it is something we build through education, empathy, and listening.

How We Can All Contribute

Everyone has a part to play in creating a future where HIV-related stigma is eliminated:

• Learn the facts about HIV and share them responsibly.

• Challenge stereotypes and outdated assumptions

• Support organisations working with affected communities.

• Encourage testing and open dialogue, helping to remove fear and shame.

A Commitment to Fairness, Today and Every Day

On World AIDS Day, we extend our support to those living with HIV, those affected by it, and those working tirelessly to provide care. We also recognise the importance of systems, structures, and communities working together to ensure equity for all.

Our commitment is simple: to support healthcare professionals, promote fairness, and help strengthen the pathways that enable compassionate, dignified, and inclusive care.

Together, we can move toward a future defined by understanding, equality, and hope.

John White

Founder & CEO

The health of people in prison, on probation and in the secure NHS estate in England

On Thursday the 6th November 2025 the Department of Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice published a landmark report by the Chief Medical Officer for England. It covered healthcare in prisons, probation and the secure NHS estate (executive summary and whole report).

The core messages of the report will be read with interest by all in the CJS healthcare community. As the CMO’s report has outlined, people in prison and on probation tend to experience higher levels of physical and mental ill-health when compared to the wider population. This is partly as a result of prevailing health inequalities and partly because of the systemic barriers which make treatment and prevention more difficult. Professor Whitty highlighted the ageing prison population as this group is continuing to rise at a higher rate than other age groups and who have additional health and social care needs which are not able to be fully addressed in the current environments. While commissioned healthcare remains the responsibility of the NHS, this report highlights that prison and probation regimes can themselves have a great impact on health. As the report concludes: “Health cannot be improved by healthcare alone” (p.32).

For those of us at SONAR, the report’s findings on the issues relating to healthcare data and information-sharing, and the associated lack of integration and interoperability, hit hardest. As our followers will know, it is precisely these concerns that have led to the SONAR project, with the belief that enabling and facilitating healthcare information to be shared in real time across all CJS settings and the NHS will improve patient outcomes.

The report said:

• “There is currently no mechanism by which the relevant essential individual data in the person’s clinical record can be routinely or directly shared with other relevant health or justice providers. This includes community mental health teams, substance misuse services or social care providers, as well as justice organisations, including probation services.”

  
  

• “There are many IT systems that sit across multiple government departments and organisations, including: the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC); Ministry of Justice (MoJ); Home Office; NHS and UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). Many of these systems cannot communicate with one another.”

  
  

• “Despite Caldicott principle 7 {“The duty to share information for individual care is as important as the duty to protect patient confidentiality”), the duty to share information, the sharing of information between different healthcare providers and across the legal and commercial boundaries is hindered by lack of staff confidence and lack of clarity on what should be shared and with whom. This persists despite the improvements to the technical capabilities.”

One of the three key recommendations of the report focused specifically on information sharing:

• “Health data are essential for safe, high-quality care, research, surveillance and planning of health services inside and outside prison. In particular it is important that NHS data from care outside of prison can be shared in and out of prison and other secure settings to allow continuity of care … The national partnership agreement for health and social care should prioritise improving data and data information sharing. Data should inform the strategic priorities of this group and be used to report accurate oversight of progress. This should be reviewed at an annual high level accountability meeting, with appropriate external oversight.”

Finally, as the report concludes, ensuring that healthcare systems are procured to common standards – a key principle of SONAR’s design – will lead to progress:

• “System interoperability by design will assist in ensuring data can be shared. This could be addressed by ensuring that all IT systems are developed to sufficient national interoperability standards as part of their non-functional requirements. The Health and Justice Information Service is already compliant with modern NHS interoperability standards. Subject to procurement, there will be a specific focus on the development of further interoperability capabilities within the new solution with one aim being better interoperability with justice data systems.”

The CMO’s report is a timely and important contribution to the evidence base for the further improvement and development of the health of people in contact with the criminal justice system. Its findings will rightly influence the development of policy for years to come – and at SONAR, we welcome the opportunity to strive to address some of the barriers highlighted in this report.

John White

Founder and CEO

IPOC's annual report on deaths during or following police contact for 2024/25

The annual report on deaths in custody from the Independent Office of Police Conduct helps us to assess progress in health and criminal justice, specifically in regard to police custody.

The long term trend is that deaths in custody have remained constant over the last 15 years. There was a substantial improvement between 2004-05, when there were 36 deaths, and 2008-09, when there were 15 deaths. The average number of deaths per year has been 18 since then.

This year’s figure, of 17 deaths, is in line with that medium term trend. As the director of the IOPC said, “Behind every death is a human story - each one is a terrible loss for their family and friends.”

As in previous years, health is a key factor. Rachel Watson, IOPC director, said: “It is disappointing that mental ill health remains a common factor in so many of these deaths.” Of the 17 deaths in 2024-25, the report found:

• “Nine people had mental health concerns. The types of mental health concerns included depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and self-harm.”

• “Fifteen people were known to have a link to alcohol and/or drugs. This meant that at the time of their arrest they had recently consumed, were intoxicated by, in possession of, or had known issues with alcohol and/or drugs. Where cause of death was reported, a pathologist recorded that alcohol or drug toxicity, or long-term abuse, was likely to be a contributing factor in the deaths of four people.”

As the director of the IOPC emphasised, reducing deaths and serious harm in police custody is not just a task for the police service: “We know that policing cannot do this alone and a wider, multi-agency response is required.”

That joined-up response should include joined-up information across health and criminal justice, which is the SONAR mission. We want to ensure that no serious harm in police custody or other CJS setting takes place because practitioners did not have up-to-minute information on health conditions and needs. As I have previously written, the Government’s efforts to introduce a single patient record across the NHS can be an important step to building a shared care record in health and criminal justice.

John White

Founder & CEO