Findings and Outputs

Standards and Quality Indicators

We wanted to create standards and quality indicators to help support health improvement amongst people on probation and to measure and monitor the quality of care that they receive.

We wanted these measures to:

  • Link closely with the objectives in the NPS Health and Social Care Strategy
  • Support probation practitioners with achieving these objectives
  • Provide data that can be shared with local health and social care partners to show where things work well and where improvements are needed. The data could be used to evidence health and social care needs and experiences of service access to inform commissioning decisions and improve service provision.

Our final standards and indicators also fit well with the objectives in the National Partnership Agreement for Health and Social Care for England 2022-2025.

The measures were based on:

  • Asking professionals working in the criminal justice and health field and people with lived experience of being on probation what they think the characteristics of high-quality health and social care for people on probation are (what standards we should meet), and how they should be measured (what our quality indicators should look like). 11 characteristics of high-quality health and social care were identified.
  • Conducting a review of the literature to identify any existing standards, indicators or guidelines that are used in adult criminal justice settings and were relevant to the objectives in the NPS Health and Social Care Strategy.
  • Combining findings from the above into a list of draft indicators that were rated by the professionals working in the criminal justice and health field and amended following their feedback.
  • This resulted in a set of 11 characteristics of high-quality care identified in the research as shown below. We created 22 corresponding standards, to be measured by 31 quality indicators.
Standards-and-IndicatorsDownload

Easy-Read Poster Summary

We worked with people with lived experience of being on probation to develop an easy-read poster summary of the findings from our project that could be displayed in probation offices. This is shown below.

This poster summary of findings has also been featured on Russell Webster’s blog here: Health & Social Care for people on probation – Russell Webster.

Journal Articles

Brooker, C., Sirdifield, C., & Parkhouse, T. (2022). Identifying mental illness and monitoring mental health in probation service settings. European Journal of Probation, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20662203221140646

Sirdifield, C., Parkhouse, T., Mullen, P., & Nadia. (2024). The characteristics of high-quality health and social care for people on probation: Professional and lived experience perspectives. Probation Journal, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/02645505231222961

Sirdifield, C., Parkhouse, T., & Brooker, C. (2024). A systematic scoping review of measures of the quality of health and social care for adults in the criminal justice system: Learning for the probation service. Probation Journal, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/02645505231221228

Sirdifield, C., Parkhouse, T., Brooker, C., & Law, G. (2024). Testing and refining an approach to identifying health and social care needs in probation. Probation Journal, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/02645505241232128