Women’s Health Review: When Promises Collapse Behind Prison Walls

The NHS says prison healthcare should mirror the care available in the community. But behind locked doors, that promise crumbles. In Women’s Health Review – Is the NHS Just Banging Its Own Drum Again?, writer Mason Morgan exposes a system stretched past breaking point; where cost-cutting, understaffing, and bureaucratic denial leave women fighting not just their illnesses, but the very healthcare services meant to keep them alive.

Across England, the NHS is facing over 100,000 vacancies, and prison healthcare mirrors that crisis. But for the women held in prisons like HMP Bronzefield and HMP Downview, understaffing is not an inconvenience, it is a threat to life. This investigation reveals a 24-hour service that exists only on paper. After 4:30 p.m., no GP is available. Nurses are exhausted. Appointments are cancelled without explanation. Complaints vanish unanswered. And women with complex conditions are left to hope their symptoms won’t escalate overnight.

Some of the accounts uncovered here are almost too shocking to believe:
• A GP telling a woman with third-degree burns to “use cold water.”
• A cancer patient waiting months for a response to a PHSO complaint while her condition worsens.
• Women routinely missing medication because the prison refused to unlock them in time.
• Staff dismissing chronic illnesses as exaggeration or drug-seeking.

The NHS’s flagship Women’s Prisons Health and Social Care Review promised trauma-informed services, menopause clinics, improved medication access, and specialist care. Four years later, most of these promises have vanished into the ether. A drumming workshop may have expanded, but cancer screenings, timely prescriptions, and access to specialists have not.

The article goes beyond statistics. It amplifies the voices of women like Annan, who lives with lupus, arthritis, and chronic pain, conditions repeatedly ignored, misunderstood, or left untreated. Her story, like so many others, lays bare the racism, misogyny, and institutional indifference woven into daily prison life.

This is more than a health crisis. It is a human rights crisis.

Women’s Health Review – Is the NHS Just Banging Its Own Drum Again? asks a question the NHS has avoided for far too long: how many more women must suffer – or die – before parity of care becomes more than a slogan?

Read the full investigation in The View 15.

Opinion article by The View.

Order the View 15 here: https://theviewmag.org.uk/product/the-view-magazine-issue-15/