Grant: Health System Impact Fellowships - PostDoc Central Canada 2 year

While prisons, jails, and remand centres were never intended to deliver healthcare services, mental illness is between 4-6 times more common in these settings. In Canada, most inmates in correctional facilities will eventually be released back in the community. As a consequence, it is vital to improve the mental healthcare services for incarcerated and released inmates to reduce adverse outcomes such as emergency department use, inpatient hospitalizations, overdose, suicides, premature mortality, and reoffending. This project will use data collected by correctional and health ministries to better understand the nature and quantity of mental illness of persons in jails and prisons. A major pillar to this project is to develop evidence-based policy that ensures a continuum of care as individuals move through the complex web of Canadian health, justice and social systems. The research will explore questions such as whether there is consistency in the identification and diagnosis of mental illness as people move from jails while awaiting trial into the prison system after sentencing, and what factors are related to improving or deteriorating mental health while in prisons. The work will serve as a demonstration of potential for linking existing data that is the responsibility of a mix of provincial/territorial and federal government departments to obtain a more complete picture of the strengths and weaknesses of existing policy from the perspective of individuals who navigate these multiple systems.