Objective To estimate the incidence of avoidable healthcare-associated harm for prisoners in England. Design A retrospective cross-sectional case note review of prisoner healthcare records. Setting 18 prisons in England were purposively sampled for maximum variation of characteristics based on prison category (open, local, training, high security and female), type (publicly and privately run) and population size. Population After screening 15 027 prisoner records, two cohorts were selected: a sample of 6294 ‘enhanced risk’ prisoners and a random sample of 853 prisoners not included in...

Introduction Around 1 in 20 patients experience avoidable healthcare-associated harm worldwide. Despite longstanding concerns, there is insufficient information available about the safety of healthcar...