CA Medical Facility Sets the Standard for Prison Medical Care
The federal receiver in charge of prison medicine considers one facility the gold standard for inmate care. The Central Medical Facility looks and feels different than other state prisons. The halls are wider to ease the way for inmates in wheelchairs. Those halls are busier, too. The prison’s chief medical officer, Dr. Joseph Bick, says that’s because most of these prisoners pose little security risk. Report from Southern California Public Radio.
“Most of them move about the facility unescorted,” says Bick. “They have a little pass. They may be going to school, work or to a doctor’s appointment to get their blood drawn.”
Inmates chronically or terminally ill
Bick points into the prison’s gymnasium window. Most prisons have to use gyms as dorms. Here, the inmates use the gym to exercise. There’s no overcrowding, because to be in the Central Medical Facility, an inmate has to be chronically or terminally ill.“The overwhelming majority of the 3000 prisoners here have some major medical problem, often multiple,” Bick says. “You see them walking around, they may be going to work or school. But they may have hepatitis, major mental illness, HIV disease, diabetes, asthma.”
Bick says most of the inmates at the Central Medical Facility can feed, dress and bathe themselves, but they need to be close to medical help.
The prison’s medical mandate inspires a professional tone between the staff and inmates. Bick says he treats inmates with respect, which earns their trust. He stops to talk to prisoners in the hallways. He calls by name to a passing inmate. They shake hands.
“Oh hey, Dr. Bick! How you doing?” the inmate says.
Not exactly ‘Cadillac care’
Prisons are typically noisy places. Bick tries to turn down the volume inside his medical clinics.Prisons often treat inmates in converted cells, broom closets or storage rooms. Bick’s clinic is a real clinic. It’s clean, white and quiet. Bick says one of the biggest unexpected benefits of that clinic is that it changes the way his patients behave.
“They come into an environment that is clearly designated as a medical environment, their voices come down.”
Bick says his modern clinic also attracts a better staff. But he says it doesn’t administer “Cadillac care.” Ask Johntae Bailey.
He was waiting for a dental appointment when his bad tooth got so bad that it woke him up in the middle of the night. A guard told Bailey he couldn’t get an emergency appointment unless his jaw was swollen.
“And I told him how’s it not a medical emergency if my tooth is throbbing and it’s killing me and I cannot sleep?” says Bailey.
Bailey asked the guard to check his file; there they found his three-week-old request to see a dentist. Bailey says the prison’s dentists care about their inmate patients.
“It just takes a long time to get there – I want you to hear it: It takes a long time to get in there!” Bailey laughs.
But Bailey says he’s waited longer for medical care at other prisons. He should know – he’s cycled through a few for drug sales or parole violations.
“You can put in a medical slip, and three or four weeks will pass and you won’t get to see them until then,” Bailey says. “That’s why you hear the alarm go off a lot of times. Because people know they got a long wait, so they just go ‘man down’ so the medical will come to them.” When an inmate goes “man down” he collapses on the floor.
Inmates’ health a public health issue
Bick says there’s usually some truth to inmate complaints – and he investigates them. He also knows few Californians care about better inmate care. But most of these prisoners will get out one day. Bick says that makes inmates’ health a public health issue that concerns everyone.“If we don’t do something to diagnose and treat the treatable diseases while they’re here,” Bick warns, “educate them about prevention of transmission of some of the illnesses they have, and then link them to services in the community when they get out – if prisons fail to do that, we’ve squandered a huge opportunity.”
Clark Kelso, the federal receiver in charge of prison medical care, considers Vacaville’s Central Medical Facility to be the best in the state prison system.
He wants a hub of similar places to cluster the sickest inmates together. The cost of sending sick inmates for care outside the prison has doubled since the receiver took over to $845 million in the most recent fiscal year. Kelso says treating them in prison facilities would save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
In June, state lawmakers approved $2 billion to build Kelso’s medical hub. But it’ll take three years to complete the main building in Stockton and that medical facility will have only enough beds for half the number of inmates with chronic or serious conditions.
Jerry McGinty, the Texas Department of Corrections’ chief financial officer, said state prisons held 11,766 offenders who are foreign citizens in July. He said it costs the state about $171 million per year to hold them, although the federal government reimburses about 10 percent of that total.
Today, California spends $1 billion more on medical care for inmates than it did in 2005 when a federal judge found that care so flawed that he seized control of the system and appointed a receiver to improve it. Prison officials say the problem’s now fixed – and it’s time to put them back in charge. But as KPCC reports, California’s prison medical system still lacks critical reforms. Story and links to resources from
Curtis Ballard rides a motorized wheelchair around his prison ward, which happens to be the new assisted-living unit — a place of many windows and no visible steel bars — at Washington state’s Coyote Ridge Corrections Center. A stroke left Ballard unable to walk. He also has had a heart attack and underwent a procedure to remove skin cancer from his neck. At 77, he’s been in prison since 1993 for murder. He has 14 years left of his sentence. News from the
“This is a calamity that is coming,” said Sen. Stan Gerzofsky, D-Brunswick, co-chairman of the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. “The population in our prisons are getting much older every year, and it is something the next Legislature will have to look at because it is becoming a calamity now, where two or three sessions ago it was just a problem.”
The Illinois Department of Corrections and University of Illinois at Chicago are partnering on a new Telemedicine Pilot Program designed to bring elaborate and sophisticated healthcare to inmates with HIV and Hepatitis C. This interagency pilot program successfully rolled out at three sites: Danville, Lincoln and Robinson Correctional Centers. News from the
Law enforcement agencies across the region are yet to reap the benefits of an amendment approved last session to reduce the amount of money counties have to pay for the medical treatment of state inmates and pre-trial detainees. Smith County Sheriff Charlie Crumpton said it’s “hard-hitting” when small sheriff’s departments in rural areas like Smith County have to spend thousands to care for state inmates. News from the
Dr. Ricki Barnett, chief medical officer for California Prison Health Care Services, has in front of her a list of two dozen of the most expensive patients under her watch. Their names and medical histories are highlighted in yellow. Complete story, additional photos and statistics in the
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the class action suit in 2008 charging grossly inadequate medical care at Ely State Prison was putting the prison’s 1,000 inmates at serious risk. The suit followed a medical report commissioned by the ACLU to investigate conditions in Ely. Dr. William Noel said in that report medical treatment conditions at Ely amounted to “a pattern of gross medical abuse.”
It’s become a challenge for Health Care Services staff to remember life before the new Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which was up and running in the late fall. It’s hard to imagine that when an inmate patient transferred from one building to another, all of his/ her medical paperwork had to be collected and physically transported to his/her new facility. It’s hard to remember that when an inmate patient arrived to a new facility, if a nurse or doctor had questions about upcoming appointments or wanted to know what was going on health-wise with the inmate, he/she had to look through pages and pages of the paper record. It is mind boggling to think that the typical way for providers to leave updates and notes about inmate patients was to place post-it notes on the paper chart. Now if a provider gets a question about an inmate/patient regarding followup appointments at outside facilities, for example, he or she can access that information right at his or her computer. Things like resubmitting orders for medications are now a matter of a few keystrokes, whereas in the days of old, the ordering practitioner would have to write out an order and fax it to the pharmacy. Published on
Ten of 13 drug and alcohol counselors at the prison near Boise aren’t qualified to provide treatment under CCA’s contract with the state, according to records obtained by The Associated Press.
As California struggles to pay for social services for its poorest residents, it spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on health care for a small group of sick inmates – in one case $1 million during a dying inmate’s final year, according to a state audit released Tuesday. News from the
trial judge’s ruling that, contrary to the administration’s argument, appointment of a receiver goes “no further than necessary to correct the constitutional violations, and was the least intrusive means,” a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared.
The contract signed this month calls for segregating inmates from other patients via a security upgrade and renovation of one floor of the hospital, formally known as University Physicians Healthcare Hospital at Kino.
days in prison at the end of Vacaville’s X-corridor in a hospice, the nation’s first.
has yet to be worked out. It has to be approved by all concerned – Stockton, San Joaquin County, the Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce, federal receiver J. Clark Kelso, and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Stockton Mayor Ann Johnston aired her frustration in a meeting Thursday with The Record’s editorial board, saying she and county leaders have received no written guarantees that the project will draw on local labor, among other demands.
A month before Virginia banned smoking in its prisons, Warden Daniel Braxton decided to kick his own 50-year smoking habit.”I figured I’d be a good role model,” said Braxton of Augusta Correctional Center in Craigsville, Va. Reported in the
Powers tried banning cigarettes years ago after issuance of a county ordinance, but two officers began selling cigarettes for $1 apiece, paper matches for 10 cents and a “striker” for 50 cents. The officers were fired.
A proposal by the Schwarzenegger administration to overhaul the troubled medical care system for inmates could save $12 billion over a decade, officials say. But it would also cost jobs. News from the
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