Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many cases of HIV were reported in prisons in England and Wales in each of the last four years.

The following table provides information on the number of adults (aged 15 and above) identified as being resident in prison at the time they received human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) treatment from specialist services. The source of the data provided is the Survey of Prevalent HIV Infection.

Notes:

1. Prisoners were identified if an adult's residential postcode was a prison postcode. However, the completeness and accuracy depends on clinicians' reports. Although completeness of full postcode is high (>90%) in each of these four years, it is still possible that partial postcode, missing postcode or clinic postcode instead of residential postcode was provided. This may lead to an underestimate of numbers in the table.

2. Data on patients (including prisoners) seen for care at non-National Health Service funded services are not included.

3. Prisoners with a short sentence might be seen for care after release and therefore not captured in this table.

Recording of prison status is not routine and numbers are likely to be under-reported. This data does not imply that transmission of infection happened while the person was in prison or that the diagnosis was made during the period of incarceration.

Genitourinary Medicine Clinic Activity Dataset data shows that the number of new HIV infections diagnosed in serving prisoners in England in 2011 was nine and in 2012 was 17.