Thank you for your interest in SONAR. I hope this monthly blog will keep you informed as we build the first Health and Social Care Case Management System (SONAR CMS) that provides contemporaneous notes, tasks and actions for those in the Criminal Justice system – through Police Custody and Courts (SONAR Custody), Prison including HMP, YOI, STC, SCH and IRC (SONAR Secure) and for people transitioning back into the community, after being held, the SONAR Release Support Hub. These different software modules seamlessly interact with each other or can stand independently of each other. All modules feed into our SONAR Data Portal for all of your business and management information requirements, data visualisation, analytical trends and real time reporting needs.
It has been an exciting journey so far. SONAR is the only NHS Digital (now NHS England) authorised H&J CMS solution with connections into the NHS Spine for the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) and Summary Care Records (SCR). We are working to bring online other key Spine services.
In addition, SONAR already has some limited access to the existing Secure Estate healthcare records and was recently awarded a place on the GP IT Tech Innovation Framework (GP IT TIF). With this design, connectivity and development roadmap, SONAR CMS will be the go to software for a case management system for Health and Social Care in Criminal Justice in the United Kingdom and potentially beyond.
Building SONAR is a labour of love for our team but, more importantly, an answer to longstanding challenges in criminal justice.
The Government is rightly committed to a zero-tolerance approach to deaths in custody, be it Police, Court or Prison. But there remains one area of provision which consistently leads to death and harm: the poor recording of health data and the absence of shared health information between police forces, between Police and Courts and between Courts and Prisons. Not to mention any of these CJ settings and the wider NHS community, e.g. Mental Health Trusts.
25 per cent of coroners’ reports on police related deaths since October 2021 have highlighted these issues. In one case, Dorset Police attended a person with serious mental health needs who had been in contact with Avon and Somerset Police earlier that day. Dorset Police were unaware of the contact with the other force. The coroner noted: “there is no means to share information automatically across Police forces regarding concerns raised about a person's welfare or health”. She concluded:
“Greater sharing of information therefore between Police forces in England and Wales regarding the welfare of those who come into contact with the Police could prevent future deaths. Evidence was given that it would be wholly beneficial, both within the Police and the NHS, if systems were able to talk to one another.”
As the Advocacy page of our website (http://www.sonarcms.co.uk/advocacy) explains, we believe one change in policy could make a positive difference.
At present electronic medical record systems, for the recording of healthcare interventions and outcomes, are commissioned separately by individual Police and Crime Commissioners. A positive change would be for single organisation, ideally NHS England, to commission a single Health and Social Care case management system across all 42 forces, using the same new procurement framework as that being used for the future of general practice information technology (“GP IT Technical Innovation Framework (TIF)”) and potentially for healthcare within other criminal justice settings (“Health & Justice Information Services, HJIS2”).
This would be a major step towards the creation of a shared care record across criminal justice and the NHS. It would also be consistent with the recommendations of the Report of the Independent Review of Deaths and Serious Incidents in Custody by Dame Elish Angiolini, which argued for a “consistency of approach” between forces on medical services within police stations, “something that is potentially undermined by the current fragmented approach”. It argued that “medical services within police stations to be brought within the NHS, in the same way they are in prisons”.
I am committed and proud to be part of the community of people, including the SONAR team, that strives to improve the lives of people in the criminal justice system.
I hope this regular blog can help to build that community further, so that together, we can improve outcomes even further.

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