Mr. Michael Donnellan:

The IPRT is right to say that many of these acutely-ill people end up behind the door of a cell for 20 or 21 hours a day. They can only be managed outside their cells for two or three hours due to the resource issue. This goes right across the Prison Service. For example, we have 15 very unwell people in Cloverhill today. Their regimes attract resources away from the ordinary prison population because sometimes very unwell prisoners must be managed through what we call "barrier handling". That means four or five prison officers are required to manage one person to move him safely from point A to point B.