Understanding and improving the quality of primary care for people in prison: a mixed-methods study

People in prison are generally in poorer health than their peers in the community, often living with chronic illness and multimorbidity. Healthcare research in prisons has largely focused on specific problems, such as substance use; less attention has been paid to conditions routinely managed in primary care, such as diabetes or hypertension. It is important to understand how primary care in prisons is currently delivered in the United Kingdom and how it can be improved, in order to reduce health inequalities. To understand the quality of primary care in prison, including gaps and variations in care, in order to recommend how quality of prison health care can be improved. A mixed-methods study with six interlinked work packages. Predominantly the North of England. Between August 2019 and June 2022, we undertook the following work packages: (1) International scoping review of prison healthcare quality indicators. (2) Stakeholder consensus process to identify United Kingdom focused prison healthcare quality indicators. (3) Qualitative interview study with 21 people who had been in prison and 22 prison healthcare staff. (4) Quantitative analysis of anonymised, routinely collected data derived from prison healthcare records (~ 25,000 records across 13 prisons). (5) Stakeholder deliberation process to identify interventions to improve prison health care. (6a) Secondary analysis of the qualitative data set, focusing on mental health and (6b) analysis of the quantitative data set, focusing on health care of three mental health subgroups. Our scoping review found predominantly only papers from the United States of America and of variable rigour with the main finding being that performance measurement is very challenging in the prison healthcare setting. In collaboration with stakeholders, we prioritised, refined and applied a suite of 30 quality indicators across several healthcare domains. We found considerable scope for improvement in several indicators and wide variations in indicator achievement that could not be attributed to differences in prison population characteristics. Examples of indicators with scope for improvement included: diabetes care, medicines reconciliation and epilepsy review and control. Longer length of stay in prison was generally associated with higher achievement than shorter stays. Indicator achievement was generally low compared to that of community general practice. We found some encouraging trends and relatively good performance for