By Bob Walsh
Supplying adequate medical care to prisoners is not an easy task. For one thing there is no actual agreed-upon definition of what adequate medical care is. I worked in the California system for 24 years. About the time I retired the feds took over the medical care within the prison system, citing too many inmate deaths and other issues with inmate health care. Many, though not all, of these issues were well-founded.
The feds got rid of the MTAs (Medical Technical Assistants) who supplied much of the on-line medical care to adult institutions because these people did not exist in the world that Dr. Sillen, the first federal receiver, worked in. Most of them were former military medical corpsmen and were better E. R. doctors than the medical doctors the prison system employed, a significant percentage of whom were grotesque incompetents or outright quacks. They were also peace officers, which bothered Dr. Sillen.
Dr. Sillen eventually got canned and a lawyer, J. Clark Kelso, took over. A significant pay raise was ordered for medical staff to help with recruitment and retention. The feds took over medical hiring and firing. Two MASSIVE new prison hospitals were built near Stockton which are still having teething problems long after opening up.
The Inspector General of the Dept. of Corrections (and rehabilitation) has just issued a scathing report asserting that medical care is still markedly inadequate in about 1/3 of the prisons that have so far been reviewed. This is all despite a doubling of spending on prison medical care and at the same time a cutback of roughly 25% of the prison population.
Much of the problem is caused by inadequate staffing levels. Strangely, competent medical people often don’t want to work in prisons. Those who are left are overworked and burnt out, which does not help the quality of medical care.
If anybody out there knows a medical doctor or nurse that wants to work their ass off in an unpleasant environment with dangerous and ungrateful patients for pretty decent money, let them know that the California prison system is hiring.
1 comment:
I remember the old days of inmate medical staff in TDC. I called one to a apparent heart attack victim in a dorm. The ex-military medic walked up, placed a mirror under the victim's nose and said, "He's dead".
The local Justice of the Peace was called and he said the same thing.
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