AN NHS trust boss has revealed it withdrew its services at a North-East jail over safety concerns for its staff due to prevalence of prisoners taking drugs such as Spice.

Tees Esk and Wear Valley NHS Trust, which provides mental health care at seven prisons in the North-East, said the volume of pyschoactive drug-taking in prisons has contributed to the proportion of inmates with mental health problems rising to 90 per cent.

Lisa Taylor, head of offender health at the trust, was speaking at a meeting at Darlington Borough Council just four months after HM Inspectorate of Prisons revealed a quarter of the 1,200 male inmates of Holme House, near Stockton, had acquired a drug problem while in the jail.

The Northern Echo:

Last year, the Prison Officers Association issued an alert over officers’ safety at the designated ‘drug recovery prison’ as a 5.6kg stash of a substance believed to be Spice, was discovered in cappuccino, Oats-so-Simple and Weetabix packets during two cell searches.

While HM Prison and Probation Service said the number of security and searching staff at the category B jail had been increased, Ms Taylor told the Tees Valley health scrutiny committee the volume of drugs in some North-East jails remained overwhelming.

She said: “I’m not disputing that the safety of the prisoners is important, but my priority is to look after our staff. If we feel there is something going on in that environment we will remove our staff for a period of time.

“We had some difficulties with people affected by Spice. It was happening an awful lot with on one wing in one prison. I rang the governor and said until you sort that out our staff are not going.

"I can’t stress enough the difficulties we are having in the prison estate at the moment with psychoactive substances.

“It is absolutely crippling us within the prison estate because we are getting mental health issues after that. It’s not everybody that comes through that has a mental health issue when they hit the prison.”

Ms Taylor said the trust, which serves North Yorkshire and the North-East, was spending “a lot of time trying to coordinate the safety of our staff”.

“It does make our jobs difficult and sometimes it is quite frustrating, but at the end of the day if we have people who are seriously mentally ill we need to treat them”, she added.

Councillor Ian Jeffrey told the committee he had been horrified to learn 90 per cent of prisoners present with mental health problems compared to 17 per cent in the wider population.

Ms Taylor said while some people’s mental health issues became evident because they were in custody, it was not uncommon for the mental health issues to be drug-related.

She said: “We are looking to support staff to look at interventions to make people think about their lives for the future. We look at people’s strengths. So if someone’s strength is in artwork we focus on that to give them some confidence to progress within that area.

“Historically for some people who have some substance issues what people focus on is drug-testing, but what is felt within drug recovery prison is not taking drugs is not the only answer. It doesn’t mean we are encouraging people to take drugs, we are trying to give people other things to do.

“We can put in all the interventions in in the world, but if they are sat on their own when they come out into the community and there is nothing else to do they will slip straight back into that addictive behaviour again.”