Prison Medicine

Social injustices, there are a lot of them, and in my job (our job) I have to deal with them each and every day often, multiple times per day. No one has enough time or energy to discuss all of these in one portfolio entry, nor would any one want to read such a composition. So, I will choose the one that irks me the most, and frustratingly, seems the easiest to resolve.

LACK OF MEDICAL CARE IN JAIL/PRISON

Certainly more lacking in the jail population than in prison since jail is an unstable situation. Anyone who works at Wishard can tell countless stories about patients who get arrested and sent to the APC or to the jail and do not get the medications that they need for their chronic medical conditions. I don’t care that people don’t get their Klonipin or their Vicodin, but dilantin, anti-psychotics, beta blockers, coumadin or plavix etc. are a different story.
Now I can see that one might argue that all of these medications are expensive and that this is not the most reliable population but generally there are few people who seek beta blockers or dilantin etc. As well, I feel that the expense argument is weak considering when these patients have an adverse event such as a seizure, they are brought to the hospital where they incur an emergency department charge (oh, wait, did I say they? I meant us) or worse they are harmed. A patient suffers a scalp laceration during his seizure or suffers cardiac ischemia without the beta blocker because his atrial fibrillation has rapid response, these are just a couple of examples.
I have major concerns about the cost of these visits to the hospital to the tax payers. I am not naïve enough to believe that there isn’t a deal between Wishard and the correctional system to reduce the cost of these visits but still, it seems it could not be less than simply giving these patients their medications.
Enough about cost, consider that it is unethical for the correctional system to jeopardize these patients health by withholding their medications. I am of the belief that jailed and imprisoned individuals deserve very few or possibly no privileges, however as one can gather from listening to the national debate on healthcare many believe that healthcare is neither a privilege or a luxury but a basic human need. Under this belief it seems that not treating these individuals’ health conditions, especially when they have no means of obtaining their own healthcare, is a violation of the laws of humanity even if the laws of this country seem to turn a blind eye to this condition.
So, the way I view this situation one can make two separate arguments in a fight to obtain more acceptable healthcare conditions for the imprisoned population. A successful fight would save taxpayer dollars, improve the health imprisoned individuals and, last but not least, make my job easier.