30 mins with time for discussion

5" Gregor

Acknowledge that the group has some knowledge of the service as it originated in Client Access, is located in Legal Help and Mon has been involved for about 18months. The service has had the close involvement of most of the A&E managers (that's kinda unusual).

PLH is a 3-year pilot project. It was established to better meet the legal needs of Victorian prisoners. It was informed by VLA’s experience in delivering a prison visiting service, and a need, acknowledged across the sector, for increased and better coordinated legal services to prisoners.

Stage 1 included establishing PLH as a phone service - to replace VLA's visiting service - in four prisons:
- DPFC
- MRC
- Loddon/Middleton
- PPP
It opened in February 2017. and expanded to Ravenhall, a new prison, in November 2017.

The project provided for an evaluation at the end of stage 1, and another at the end of the pilot, after expansion to all prisons.

The stage 1 evaluation started September 2017, and a draft report was presented to the steering committee in February 2018

The report evaluates whether the PLH stage 1 model is appropriate and sustainable, and makes 20 recommendations to inform the stage 2 development and expansion of PLH to the remainder of Victorian prisons. .

Mon 5"

Mixed methods
1. quantitative data - ATLAS, LARs, Prison visit records, Live OPS.
2. qualitative data:

prisoner survey - developed with evalaution team and contacts at the pilot prisons. Survey asked about frequency of use, usefulness of service, asked respondents to self assess stress levels before and after and for their recommendations going forward. 76 prisoners contributed via 55 responses to the survey and 21 responses to a separate survey initiated by staff at Loddon.

interviewed staff at 4 pilot prisons asking about their perceptions of client satisfaction, efficiency, accessibility and recommendations. We also spoke to PWG

staff reflections workshop with 20 carefully selected people and two focus groups with PLH staff and Legal Help management.

Steering committee feedback.

Gregor 10"

acknowledge that prisoners call back to complete their inquires or to follow up. So not a reflection of discrete inquiries.

Currently tracking at 6,000 calls/year (based on last 6 months)

The report found that the total time spent per client prison visit was twice as long with the prison visits when compared to phone calls to PLH.

Visiting service was 55" per client for 22" contact and follow-up time

Subsequent modeling by Legal help suggests that PLH call handling times are 12" or about 1/3 of prison visits

Time: It's taken longer than we thought to get this evalaution signed off (about six months from finalising the text). While that has been a worthwhile process it is worth allowing for this and working to mitigate against extended sign off by perhaps bringing key people in earlier. Saying this, no matter how early you involve people it can sometimes takes time for some to engage fully with a text

Audience: being clear about who you are writing for is critical. We thought we were writing for an internal audience but in the end we will make the report available via the website. While this is a good thing, we would have written it differently if we'd decided this earlier. We've adjusted for this by making it clear in the introduction who we initially wrote the report for.

Changing environment: not sure exactly what this is about....LH environment, VLA environment?

Reviewing and implementing recommendations. What will happen first? How many have already been implemented?

Comms
Fabulous info :