2025: A year of progress in Health and Justice

Events in 2024 set a clear and positive agenda for the development of health and justice. The Secretary of State for Justice set the lead by saying that while the prison building programme will be completed, “we simply cannot build our way out of the problem”. Instead, the Government has launched a review of sentencing with a clear objective to cut crime by reducing reoffending. In our submission to the review, SONAR showed that our ReSet module will make a major contribution by providing full access to healthcare information for ex-prisoners and help to keep key appointments for probation and other services.

In October, the Department of Health and Social Care committed the new government to joined-up healthcare records, as part of the consultation ahead of the new ten-year plan on the NHS. As readers of this blog will know, the creation of a shared record across health and criminal justice is at the heart of the SONAR project.

We will continue to promote the key policy change for NHS England to commission a single Health and Justice Case Management System across all 42 forces. With the aim to raise awareness of the need for a mandatory minimum standard of healthcare IT requirements, that all police forces should commission against to improve patient safety and reduce risk for the police. As well as improving outcomes, this would help to achieve the Home Office’s objective of making the police more efficient through a lower cost of procurement.

Our engagement with the Health and Justice community is a core part of our work. In 2024 we were proud to sponsor multiple annual conferences including the National Police Chiefs’ Council (Custody), UKAFN, Thriving Survivors and the 11th Health and Justice Summit.

A huge thanks to the SONAR and JWPM team who made 2024 such a success. We delivered outstanding levels of service and broke new ground by implementing SONAR modules in police custody suites in Lincolnshire and Lancashire and in prisons in the East of England. We are working towards a strong pipeline in these markets, with the hope of implementing positive change. Thank you again for your interest as we have started moving into an exciting 2025.

John White

Founder & CEO

Meeting the prisons challenge

Anyone working in the justice sector will have found the latest annual report of the prisons inspectorate a difficult read.

We all want to improve outcomes and help with the core task of reducing reoffending. The findings of the report - rising violence and self-harm, low levels of purposeful activity, unsatisfactory efforts at rehabilitation – are a reminder of how much there is to do.

For our team, the findings on healthcare and rehabilitation were of particular interest.

Prison healthcare is under pressure. Vacancy rates for healthcare staff are “high” and there are “chronic issues” with recruitment and retention. Many prisons did not have an adequate number of clinical staff to deliver effective care, particularly in regard to mental health and the safe provision of medicines. The inspectorate raised concerns with medicines practices and oversight at 14 prisons and the Care Quality Commission issued seven regulatory notices specific to medicines in prisons in England. In contrast, one characteristic of successful prisons is that they make good use of data, including healthcare data.

Work to reduce the risk of reoffending was “not good enough”. The inspectorate judged purposeful activity to be poor or not sufficiently good in 31 of the 39 adult prisons inspected this year. Prisons often did not fulfil their vital role in preparing prisoners coming to the end of their sentence for return to the community, with weaknesses in resettlement provision and support for family relationships. The chief inspector of prison summarised his concerns by saying:

“Most jails already fail to give prisoners enough to do and population increases are likely to make things worse. If prisoners leave prison without having learnt the skills and habits that will help them to hold down a job, if they are not being taught to read, if they are being sold drugs without support to break their addiction and if they continue to live in environments in which violence is commonplace, prisons will fail in their duty to prevent future reoffending.”

All of this strengthens our motivation to help health and justice professionals meet their goals through improved information systems. SONAR has been designed to support easy information entry and reference, helping prison staff provide accurate interventions including medicines.

As I described in our recent blog on the latest early release scheme, SONAR will provide additional support post-release. It will help offenders find jobs by providing an appointment diary. It will inform all relevant agencies, and key family members, if appointments are missed – which can also be an important risk factor.

What the annual report shows is that prisons, and prisoners, do not exist in isolation. They are part of a wider system, receiving prisoners from custody and preparing them for release, which itself is under pressure. That is why we have built SONAR to be the first integrated health information for criminal justice, able to link the system’s component parts. We look forward to working with custodial staff across the United Kingdom and Ireland.

John White

Founder & CEO

Landmark Sentencing Review Reflections

For those of us who believe in better health and criminal justice outcomes in the UK, these are exciting times. The new Government immediately made the case for a new and better approach based on reduced reoffending, and it has stayed true to that. In the last month, four major initiatives all point towards the integration of healthcare information across criminal justice – which is exactly the aim of our work.

Sentencing review

On 21 October, the Government announced a sentencing review, led by the former justice secretary David Gauke, which will report by Spring 2025.

The review has three core principles:

• “make sure prison sentences punish serious offenders and protect the public, and there is always the space in prison for the most dangerous offenders”;

  
  

• “look at what more can be done to encourage offenders to turn their backs on a life of crime, and keep the public safe by reducing reoffending”; and

  
  

• “explore tougher punishments outside of prison to make sure these sentences cut crime while making the best use of taxpayers’ money”.

  
  

Our work at SONAR is directly relevant to this agenda.

As the prison population expands, the task of ensuring excellent healthcare becomes all the more important. SONAR continues to be the only healthcare information system specifically created for criminal justice and operable across all services. Prison healthcare staff will be able to access the same record as their colleagues in police custody and in courts. Its design facilitates accurate collection of data and use of that data to plan interventions effectively.

Better healthcare is itself a contributory factor to successful rehabilitation. SONAR also helps through its ReSet module for post-release. It can support the NHS England RECONNECT service and wider reoffending work, for example by flagging missed appointments to the families of offenders and to practitioners

Change NHS

On the same day, the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary launched Change NHS: a public consultation which will feed the views of citizens and professionals into the new ten-year plan for the NHS, expected next year.

The launch event emphasised the importance of sharing of healthcare information. As the Department of Health and Social Care said:

“In transforming the NHS from analogue to digital, the government will create a more modern NHS by bringing together a single patient record, summarising patient health information, test results, and letters in one place, through the NHS App. It will put patients in control of their own medical history, meaning they do not have to repeat it at every appointment, and that staff have the full picture of patients’ health. New laws are set to be introduced to make NHS patient health records available across all NHS trusts, GP surgeries and ambulance services in England - speeding up patient care, reducing repeat medical tests and minimising medication errors.”

SONAR is consistent with this vision. The different SONAR modules already connect to key NHS Spine records, and will connect to new integrated NHS records in future.

Data Use and Access Bill

On 24 October, the Government published a new Bill which will support its plans for the NHS. As the launch news release said: “It will require IT suppliers for the health and care sector to ensure their systems meet common standards to enable data sharing across platforms.” The Government expects benefits to include the freeing-up of 140,000 hours of NHS staff time every year.

Autumn Budget 2024

Lastly, in her Budget on 30 October, the Chancellor provided the necessary funding for the NHS. She said that over £2 billion will be invested in NHS “technology and digital” to drive productivity improvements, free up staff time and enhance patient access through the NHS App.

Conclusion

Speaking at the launch of the new Bill, Vin Diwakar, National Director of Transformation at NHS England, said:

“These changes will lay the foundations for patient information to flow safely, securely and seamlessly, which will improve clinical outcomes, make decision-making more informed and speed up the delivery of care. By simply using data more efficiently, we can save time and money, and create a modern, digital NHS that continues to improve care for patients.”

By connecting this new NHS vision to criminal justice, let’s create an integrated healthcare CJS information system for the first time – with all the benefits to outcomes and efficiency that will follow.

John White

Founder and CEO