The policing white paper – another step to integrated healthcare information?

Two key policy papers have been published in the last three months. The first, by Professor Chris Whitty, was the best review of healthcare in criminal justice for many years. The second was the Home Office white paper on the future of policing.

“From local to national: a new model for policing” argued that policing in England and Wales should be restructured. The number of forces should be reduced, to minimise spending on back-office functions and to give better access to specialist services. (An independent review will recommend the new number of forces, reporting this summer.)

Most importantly, a new National Police Service will provide better access to technology. As the white paper said:

“The NPS will do four things:

1. “Provide a single source of strategic leadership for the police service, replacing the confused mix of existing institutions.

2. “By setting stronger national standards, it will ensure a more consistent service is received by the public regardless of where they live. The NPS will be empowered to set mandatory standards in areas such as professional practice, training, technology, data and workforce planning.

3. “Provide local policing with better enabling and support services … Efficiencies will be realised by buying technology and equipment nationally, delivering savings that will be reinvested in the frontline. The NPS will provide a platform for developing new technologies and deploying them more quickly across the country.

4. “Strengthen our ability to tackle terrorism and serious and organised crime.”

The white paper does not mention healthcare, healthcare information or police custody specifically. But it is easy to see how the recommendations of the white paper could improve these key areas of provision.

The National Police Service will ensure national standards of policing, including technology. For healthcare information, this could mean the adoption of the standards already created by NHS Digital. The NPS would procure against these standards, at the national level.

As I have argued before, these standards could then be adopted across criminal justice and the NHS. That would create the transferability of healthcare information which was one of three key recommendations of the Whitty report.

As the Chief Medical Officer said:

“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. There are also many IT systems that sit across multiple government departments and organisations relevant to healthcare and many of these systems cannot communicate with one another.”

From the outset, SONAR has been designed to be a service that can deliver on these policy ambitions. We look forward to working with the health and justice community to turn these ideas into reality.

John White

Founder & CEO