Prevent in Health
The implementation of the Prevent duty in the health sector erodes the trust between healthcare employees and their patients. This page also includes cases and resources involving mental health.
“Emily, Rebecca and other English children can write four pages [in English] – why can’t you?’ The optician repeated this six times, until the boy’s father asked why he was posing such irrelevant questions to his nine-year-old son. The optician admitted he had recently attended Prevent training.”
Read more: ‘What about them English girls?’
Cases in the Health Sector
The depth of the harm of Prevent in health has been revealed by MedAct, in a 2021 report exposing the presence of a secretive counterterrorism police-led mental health project called ‘Vulnerability Support Hubs’ to implant Prevent in the health sector.
As early as 2016, the Royal College of Psychiatrists raised the alarm in its position statement about Prevent in terms of its conflict with the duties of a doctor, as well as its use as a data collection mechanism for purposes other than care.
“The Prevent visit to my workplace in the health sector is a violation of my privacy. I am a law-abiding citizen and I feel that my rights are being violated and that I am being discriminated against due to my faith.”
Why is Prevent harmful in the health sector?
The presence of Prevent in health means that doctors themselves – across various fields – have expressed deep ethical concerns with being legally obligated to report patients for “extremism”.
Prevent harms the crucial trust dynamics of medicine because:
- Its vague indicators of extremism turn patients in need into suspects
- It is not safeguarding because its concern is to protect the state not the patient
- It cuts at the core of the Hippocratic Oath that is the foundation of healing
- It causes healthcare employess to view each other with suspicion when teamwork is crucial
Expert Views
Helpful Resources
