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| UK Prisons Face Health Crisis |
| By Reuters |
| Published: 04/27/2001 |
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Inadequate resources and low morale among doctors and nurses have brought health care in Britain's prisons to a state of crisis, according to a report from the British Medical Association. Medical staff in prisons are consistently starved of adequate funding to treat prisoners, who often come from deprived backgrounds and have complex medical and psychological problems, the association said. Like the state-funded National Health Service (NHS), which has been criticized for staff shortages, creaking facilities and a series of damaging medical scandals, the report describes a prison system that focuses on satisfying short-term political and media concerns but hampers the delivery of satisfactory health care in prisons. The government has responded by promising a three-year funding boost of 14 million ($19.9 million US) to improve staff training and tackle infectious diseases, and 10.5 million ($14.9 million US) to provide an extra 4,000 drug detoxification programs a year. In the report, doctors complained about a lack of psychiatric nurses, clinical psychologists and counselors in prisons and a sense of isolation professionally. They called for better terms and conditions for prison doctors to enable the prison service to attract and keep the best physicians. |
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