HMP Nottingham

During this inspection we saw evidence that the provider had taken action to rectify some of these issues, such as recruiting staff and carrying out an analysis of why people failed to attend their appointments, which had led to actions such as ensuring patients had an appointment slip. Some of the issues were outside of the provider's control, such as prison officers not collecting patients for their appointments and we could see that the provider was discussing these with the prison. However, we still found that patient waiting times were too long, such as to see the GP or for a secondary health screen.

People we spoke with were happy with the care provided. One person told us "It's all been fine, absolutely fine", another stated, "It's alright when you see them" but that it was difficult to get appointments. People told us that staff were 'friendly' and 'approachable'.

Although there were systems in place to ensure that a quality service was being delivered we found that these did not always bring about the desired change and action was slow.

We spoke with 15 people who had used the healthcare service and asked if they felt staff treated them with dignity and respect. The people we spoke with told us that they felt staff treated them respectfully. One person said, 'I've had no problems with healthcare staff.' Another person said, 'My experience of healthcare has been good so far.'

We spoke with 15 people who had used the healthcare service and asked if they were satisfied with the care and treatment they had received. People we spoke with were dissatisfied about access to and waiting times for different services. One person said, 'You have to wait ages, the waiting lists are too long.' Another person said, 'I am not happy that I've had to wait so long to see the doctor.'

A range of physical health, mental health and substance misuse services were being provided in the prison. Whilst the waiting time for some clinics was acceptable we saw that there were excessive waits for others. For example, at the time of our inspection there were 203 people waiting to receive their secondary health screen.

We saw that an appropriate procedure was in place to arrange for external hospital appointments. There was an emergency protocol in place with the prison to allow an ambulance into the prison grounds in case of an emergency. This had been recently amended so that prison staff would make a call to the emergency services before the arrival of healthcare staff.

Staff received appropriate support through induction, training, supervision and appraisal.

The provider had appropriate systems in place to monitor the quality of the service being provided, however this did not always result in the required improvements. Complaints were not always responded to appropriately or in a timely manner.