Person-centred care ensures that care is driven by patients’ needs rather than those of the healthcare providers, but in a prison environment both healthcare professionals and prisoners with long-term health conditions face well-documented challenges in putting person-centred care into practice. This study seeks to address this by adapting an existing intervention, called SNAP.
Background
In palliative and end of life care person-centred conversations enable patients to work with health care professionals to identify and address their support needs. This ensures that care is driven by patients’ needs rather than those of the healthcare providers. The NHS recommends person-centred care but there is little guidance on how to provide it. In a prison environment, both healthcare professionals and prisoners with long-term health conditions face well-documented challenges in putting person-centred care into practice.
In an earlier project we developed a way to enable person-centred care for patients with chronic or progressive conditions called the Support Needs Approach for Patients (SNAP: www.thesnap.org.uk). SNAP uses a set of questions (the SNAP Tool) that sit inside a booklet called the “How are you?” Booklet. The questions help patients think about areas where they need more support and lead to a needs-led conversation between the patient and a health care professional to help address those support needs together.
SNAP was first developed for patients with chronic lung disease and is now being used to enable person-centred conversations for patients with a range of chronic physical conditions. In this project we will adapt SNAP (both the SNAP Tool and the needs-led conversation) for use with prisoners with progressive, long-term health conditions.
Project Aim
- adapt SNAP to enable delivery of person-centred care for prisoners with progressive, conditions.
- establish the acceptability of the prison-adapted SNAP, and
- investigate the feasibility of a future Realist Evaluation of the prison-adapted SNAP for prisoners with progressive conditions.
Project Activity
- Undertake an integrative literature review of the involvment of prisoners in conversations about their support needs
- Interviews and focus groups with prioners and ex-prisoners to adapt the SNAP Tool (the “How are you?” booklet) for use in prisons
- Adapt SNAP (the intervention) for prisons: workshops or interviews with prisoners/ex-prisoners, prison-based health care professionals and other prison staff to identify and address potential issues around the delivery of SNAP in a prison context.
- Establish acceptability of the prison-adapted SNAP tool/intervention within two or three prisons. The delivery of SNAP will be evaluated through interviews with prisoner patients and prison staff and with workshops and end-of-study focus groups with prison staff.
- A national stakeholder roundtable meeting will be held to consider the findings of the study, to generate policy recommendations regarding the wider implementation of the prison-adapted SNAP.
Anticipated or actual outputs
- prisons-adapted SNAP Tool
- prisons-optimised SNAP
- SNAP training for prisons
- a plan for Realist Evaluation
- academic outputs
- HCP webinars and
- policy/prison community-focused communications
Papers/resources associated with this project
Who is involved?
- Professor Morag Farquhar: Professor of Palliative Care Research (UEA) (Joint PI)
- Dr Carole Gardener: Senior Research Associate (UEA) – Corresponding researcher (Joint PI)
- Dr Chris Chaloner: Senior Research Associate (UEA)
- Dr Sarah Hanson: Associate Professor in Community Health (UEA)
- Dr Jane Senior: Senior Lecturer in Forensic Mental Health (University of Manchester)
- Professor Lynn Saunders: Professor of Applied Criminology (University of Derby)
- Dr Annelise Matthews: Consultant in Palliative Medicine (Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust/ Cambridgeshire Secured Services)
- Ms Maria O'Neill: Palliative Clinical Nurse Specialist (Northampton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust/Cambridgeshire Secured Services)
- Anita Dockley: Freelance consultant in prison reform
- Dr Lucy Wainwright: Prison Research Consultant (EP:IC)
Contact: m.farquhar@uea.ac.uk ; carole.gardener@uea.ac.uk
