Project Details
Supervisor
Project area or title
SAFERAP – Safe and Fair Reintegration and healthcare Access after Prison release
Description
There are around 87,000 people in prison across England & Wales. As a group, they experience high levels of mental and physical health needs and substance misuse. Successfully reintegrating people into society after a period in prison has wide-ranging benefits. However, there are many challenges on release.
For those with mental health problems, unequitable access to mental healthcare and other support services is an important concern. One potential reason for this is overestimation by services of the risk of violent offending, which can create barriers to treatment. Accurately identifying risk, which is typically low, could provide reassurance and support access to services. Vice versa, better identifying people at highest risk of reoffending, and directing proportionate resources at reducing risk, could have significant wider societal benefit.
Simple, scalable risk prediction tools used as clinical supports can improve the accuracy of decisions that are based on risk, and elsewhere in medicine these have been successfully clinically embedded to support stratified pathways. This project will examine whether this approach can be applied to better meet individual needs at prison release: specifically, whether tools from the “OxRisk” (oxrisk.com) suite for violence and reoffending are accurate in a UK prison setting, and how they can be clinically implemented.
The project will involve 1) externally validating a prediction tool for violent reoffending, using routine clinical data, and 2) using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the acceptability, feasibility and potential clinical role of the tools among multi-agency professionals who work with prisoners during the peri-release period.
Theme
Severe Mental Health (covering psychosis, forensic)
University
University of Nottingham
Specific Project Eligibility
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pgstudy/course/research/sociology-and-social-policy-phd