Hi all of you working in or around prisons. I was just wanting to get a few views on dispensing times in your prison for methadone. Our patients strongly want methadone in a morning but with 300+ dispenses per day our prison is understandably finding it difficult to cope so there's a morning round and an early evening one. I'm interested in knowing what happens in your prison and if you give in the morning how you have managed to strike a balance such that it doesn't unduly affect the smooth running of the prison

Hi Nat,
We dispense in the mornings-we only have 35 on IDTS so far but we give them all appointment times-about 3 every 5 mins-and we start at 8.30am once there is movement.

Hi Nat,

I would be surprised if any of the big locals dealing with hundreds of people are able to do all the dispensing in the morning.

yes that is what was behind my question really. It's how to balance service user requests (i.e. morning dispense ala community), with the logistics of running a busy prison

50 clients generally takes me about 2.5 hours

We have about 170 prisoners who are prescribed methadone and it's all dispensed by 9.15am. The methadone is dispensed in the residential areas first thing in the morning. It's labour intensive as there are 3 nurses each covering different areas of the prison and officers act as competent witnesses. We are in the halls ready to start dispensing by 0745. We are a long term establishment so don't have a lot of prisoner movement to and from courts.