The health care and medical services for inmates involves providing medical services required to maintain physical and mental health in order to accomplish correctional administrational purposes such as education and social rehabilitation.
While the number of daily inmates remain relatively unchanged for the recent several years, the rate of patient occurrence such as number of treatments, prescriptions and treatments by external hospitals is continuously increasing. As the interest towards health care of prisoners and demands for high quality medical services rapidly increase due to the growth in human rights consciousness, the demand for treatments by external hospitals is rapidly increasing. However, the correctional authorities are restricting the implementation to strict minority of patients due to the risk of correctional accidents such as escape by prisoners, shortage of security staffs and expensive treatment costs, have bought surge of complaints from consumers due to the delay in treatments. Compared to medical and health systems of the public, the medical staffs, facilities and equipments in correctional facilities are generally lacking. The rapid increase of demand for external hospital treatments due to lack of medical specialists and equipments is a significant problem that consumes a great number of security staffs and expenses. Therefore fundamental measures on health care and medical services for inmates are required.
First of all, an overall improvement in the treatment system is required so that the medical staffs of the correctional facilities can accommodate medical demands such as basic treatments and dosage as the primary medical organ, and minimize the number of patients that requires transfer to external hospitals. In addition, the demand for external treatment arising from the shortage of dental and psychiatric specialists should be satisfied with a local medical voluntary system or treatment systems through invitation of community medical staffs. For the case of first-aid or seriously ill patients, they should be transferred to external hospitals immediately and actively utilize the stay of execution of the sentence, sick bail, parole etc.
Telemedicine involves treatment and prescription by an external doctor through video communication and is an alternative that reduce keep staffs and expenses required for the treatment, while effectively disperse increasing demand for external hospital treatment at the same time. Such treatment method should be implemented further.
As a foundational measure, the establishment of prison focused on medical treatments and correctional hospitals as in advanced nations such as United States and Japan is necessary. Medical staffs of the correctional facilities are to carry out the function as a primary medical organ such as treatment and administration of trivially ill patients and screening of the need for transfer treatment to external hospitals. Then the prison focused on medical treatments appointed for each region accommodate major patients that require surgery or hospitalization and carry out the role of secondary medical organ. Correctional hospital is to provide technical treatments to prisoners that have serious or special illness or requires long term treatment, technical surgery or hospitalization as a tertiary medical organ. The above foundation of primary, secondary and tertiary medical and health transfer system will enable the medical facility to devote in treatment of prisoners, reduce the number of transfer patients to external hospitals and prevent nursing burden and risks arising from security issues, creating a epochal turning point in health care and medical services for inmates in correctional facilities.