It starts with the individual
Quality in healthcare starts with the individual — the person in front of our clinician, and the clinician themselves. We recruit people with the right skills and values, invest in their training and development, and regularly monitor performance to ensure consistently high standards of care.
We have long championed more transparent, accessible reporting across health and justice settings, and we hold ourselves to the same standards we advocate for others. Our approach is built on openness: actively seeking patient feedback, developing robust improvement plans, and ensuring that any shortcomings are reviewed fully and shared widely.
External regulation and scrutiny
Care Quality Commission (CQC)
We are regularly reviewed by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England, whose published ratings help people make informed choices about care. CQC make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and encourage care services to improve.
Assurance framework
The Health in Justice Integrated Quality Framework provides a structured approach to ensuring that healthcare services delivered within secure environments are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. It brings together quality governance, clinical effectiveness, patient safety, workforce development and continuous improvement into a single framework, enabling services to consistently monitor performance and improve outcomes for patients.
The framework promotes a holistic, person-centred model of care that integrates physical health, mental health, substance misuse, rehabilitation and resettlement support, while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and NHS quality requirements. Through robust assurance processes, performance monitoring and patient engagement, the framework supports the delivery of high-quality healthcare and helps reduce health inequalities among people within the justice system.
Patient Safety Framework
Our patient safety approach is governed by the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), the national framework published by NHS England in August 2022 which replaced the Serious Incident Framework. PSIRF represents a fundamental shift in how healthcare organisations respond to patient safety incidents — moving away from a blame-focused, threshold-based approach towards one grounded in compassionate engagement, systems-based learning, and proportionate, improvement-focused responses.
Practice Plus Group HiJ, then operating as Care UK, was among the small cohort of early adopters, and the only healthcare provider in secure environments, who piloted the framework before its national rollout, helping to shape the final version through real-world testing and feedback. We are proud to have played a role in developing a framework that is now mandatory for all providers of NHS-funded care.
Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) policy
View all of our Quality Accounts, Gender Pay Gap Reports and other legal documents.
