Background Prisoners tend to have poorer physical, mental and social health than the population at large. Moreover, prison takes away autonomy. In our institution, a multidisciplinary health promotion programme has been developed to help prisoners adopt healthy behaviour that can be taken back into the community. Treatment compliance has been identified as a relevant skill to enhance clinical outcomes.

Purpose To develop a workshop on treatment compliance and assess its effectiveness.

Materials and methods The workshop involved a physician, two nurses and was led by two pharmacists. It combined theoretical exchange and practical training about the empowerment of patients in their health care, in order to improve their therapeutic compliance. At the end of the session, a self-rating questionnaire was performed to assess outcomes from 3 learning objectives (LO):

• – LO1: to identify and take advantage of key steps in the communication with medical staff in order to understand illness and treatment;

• – LO2: to acquire information about medicines I am taking;

• – LO3: to acquire good habits in drug use.

An open question explored the learnt skills that will be set up after the workshop.

The impact was estimated bringing together inmates’ satisfaction, learning outcomes and achievement transfer.

Results 15 prisoners participated in one session. The total post-workshop scores were significantly improved for LO 1(3.4 ± 0.3 vs. 4.3 ± 0.2; p = 0.001) and LO 3 (3.5 ± 0.4 vs. 4.4 ± 0.2; p = 0.001). These increases show a learning effect. Relative improvements were 56.3% for LO1 and 60.8% for LO3. These results validate the pedagogical efficiency of coordinators. The score for LO2 did not improve significantly.

14/15 (93%) considered themselves ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’. Although the only ‘poorly satisfied’ person misunderstood the topic of this workshop, all the participants were ready to take part in other sessions, illustrating relevance.

About achievement transfer, key points from all LOs were reported with an average of two new skills per patient.

Conclusions The active involvement of inmates during the workshop revealed interest and a desire for information about their role in health care system. Increased knowledge and patient satisfaction illustrated the positive effect of this workshop. These short-term results are really encouraging and emphasise the additive value of pharmacists’ involvement in health education programmes going on in prisons.

No conflict of interest.