Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress his Department is making on linking prison health records to community GPs.

NHS England signed a contract on 20 October 2017 for an enhanced IT system for prison clinical records. The Health and Justice Information Service (HJIS) will introduce a similar data-sharing approach to that used in the community when a patient changes their general practitioner (GP).

HJIS will enable people in prisons, immigration removal centres and the secure children and young people’s estate (collectively referred to as the “residential estate”) to be registered, via the NHS Spine, with the healthcare service in the residential estate.

In future, once the new functionality is deployed, it will be possible for the patient’s clinical records to be transferred from the community for use in the residential estate, and when they leave, for the updated record to be retrieved in the community when they register again with a community GP.