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Wellcome Trust award success for Dr Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Dr Erzsebet Strausz
Since the 2011 Prevent Review by the UK government, the NHS has been made a partner in the delivery of counter-radicalisation. The Department of Health states that terrorism can be defeated by extending safeguarding structures (for detecting domestic, physical and sexual abuse of patients) to the 'radicalisation' symptoms which precede political violence (suggesting that a category of 'ideological abuse' now exists). Despite the unprecedented nature of this move, no academic study has explored the implementation and ethics of counter-terrorism delivered by healthcare providers. This study explores the shift in NHS safeguarding from a social security mandate towards the policing of deviance. Here terrorism is framed as a detectable and quasi pathological affliction, necessitating surveillance of the population by doctors and nurses tasked with the promotion of good health. But the symptoms of 'radicalisation' are not clear, so how does the NHS go about looking for them? Our study will interrogate NHS Prevent training and safeguarding structures to ascertain how 'intuitive professional judgement' of deviance is produced and to what effect.