Summary
The challenge of providing support and bringing together the criminal justice and health and social care systems is enormous. Ongoing care from mental health services is limited and, despite improvements, 65% of individuals do not link back into community substance misuse services. Discontinuities of care are challenging, particularly for the 56% of people released without settled accommodation. Prison, and the time of release, provides opportunities for preventing problems and linking people back to services after release.
The Reconnect programme helps vulnerable prison-leavers link into services. An Enhanced Reconnect (ER) service is being tested for more complex people who may have an increased risk of harm to themselves or others. The project is carrying out five small studies and then, in a sixth study, it will look at all the results together. It is conducting familiarisation work to understand who is delivering the service and how people think it should be having its effect.
This pilot study involves conducting an evaluation to help understand what support vulnerable prison-leavers need to help them connect with services.
We are conducting interviews and virtual workshops with clinicians delivering the services, as well as the people involved in the planning of ER. Observation and qualitative interviews are being done to understand how the ER team members work together and with other services. Examination of ER records will look at how ER services are helping people and linking them into other services. The team is also working with ER sites to see how they can collect a minimum dataset to monitor longer term programme outcomes. It will also create case studies describing in detail how individuals are supported and respond to ER services.