Beyond the Bars

Behind the bars

For us secure environment HCPs, security is all around. Alarms, bars, keys and locks are everywhere! They adorn our consulting rooms. They’re all over our patients’ bedrooms. They’re in our offices and even around our waists. If it wasn’t for our stethoscopes, we could be mistaken for discipline staff. Heck, we even do the same behind bars training, what with key talks, breakaway training and the like! And on the subject of training…

Equivalence of care

We’re all agreed that detained patients should receive care that is equivalent to that given to free patients. After all, our ambulance service colleagues do not change their standard of care as their vehicles drive in & out of our environments’ gates. Neither should we. Still though, as we know all too well, equivalence of care doesn’t mean equal care and can get really complicated:-

Where the consideration of ‘equivalence’ becomes more pertinent is where the provision of healthcare is in some way constrained or altered by the regime, its processes or other factors which could have an impact on care delivery… a person’s care needs thus becomes more complex and the more the potential for conflict between the health and security provision may arise.

Royal College of General Practitioners’ Secure Environment Group (RCGP SEG)

In recent years, a few of the largest providers have started their own in-house CPD programmes. And great events such as the RCGP SEG’s Health & Justice Conference are welcome opportunities to meet up annually and discuss the biggest issues facing secure environment healthcare.

Yet with staff shortages, many clinicians working as locums, and UK doctors having to clock up 50 hours of appropriate CPD every year, we need additional sources of CPD other than in-house provision and annual conferences. There is a huge appetite for independent, ongoing CPD programmes designed for front-line, patient-facing secure environment clinicians.

beyond the bars

And so Ladies and Gentlemen, we are proud to present Beyond the Bars - a high quality, ongoing, bespoke CPD programme for secure environment HCPs.

Are you a secure environment HCP?

Would you like to reach out beyond your environment’s bars,

grab onto gold standard community care,

give it an appropriate tweak or two,

and draw it back in to use in your day-to-day practice?

If you’re nodding, then we want you!

We are excited to announce the launch of Beyond the Bars - a bespoke continuing professional development (CPD) programme for secure environment healthcare professionals (HCPs).

care

Adhering to the principle that detained patients are entitled to equivalence of care compared with free patients, this innovative programme is a chance for dedicated prison doctors and other secure environment HCPs to reach out beyond their secure environments’ bars, grab onto gold standard community care methods, give them an appropriate tweak or two, and then draw their learning back in through the bars to improve their detained patients’ day-to-day care.

Webinars

Delivered through our intranet, the programme consists of monthly 1.5-hour Zoom webinars, each of which will run twice - a UK-focused version will be held on the first Tuesday evening of each month at 19:00 GMT, and a truly international version will be held on the first Saturday of each month at 13:00 GMT.

Resources

Recordings and other multimedia resources from previous webinars will be available to signed-up HCPs. And participants will also benefit from a carefully moderated, encrypted chat forum.

Heart

In keeping with our ‘heart for detainees’ ethos, every secure environment HCP who cares passionately about his/her detained patients will be welcome. Lack of funds will not be a bar to participation. And everything we do take in programme fees will be spent on the care of detainees in low and middle-income countries including the Philippines where we provide increasingly complex humanitarian offender healthcare.

Launch

Beyond the Bars launches on Tuesday 2nd March @ 19:00 hrs GMT & Saturday 6th March @ 13:00 hrs GMT with a complimentary webinar, ‘A stretch too far! There’s more to self-care than resilience training’.

Programme

A provisional programme has been drawn up for April onwards. However, as with everything else we do, we are keen to get user involvement in developing this new service. All secure environment HCPs are welcome to submit their programme ideas.

Enlist

Sounds good? We think so. So why not register for our launch event and/or our ongoing Beyond the Bars programme? It’d be criminal not to!