The European Forum for Primary Care annual conference took place in Ghent (Belgium), from the 25th till 27th September 2022. The conference focused on Integrated Community Care.
Within the conference, the working group on Prison Health organized a workshop ‘The health of detainees and the role of primary care’. The chair of this working group is Anke van Dam, advisor on prison health to AFEW International.
The working group on Prison Health exists for 4 years and has already organised several webinars: the first webinar was on comparing different health systems for prisons in countries like the UK, Kyrgyzstan, and the Netherlands. The second webinar was to share the perspectives on care from an ex-detainee and health professionals. The information gathered in meetings and webinars led to the development of a position paper on ‘the health of detainees and the role of primary care’, which was published in ‘Primary Health Care Research and Development’.
Anke van Dam, the chair of the working group, advisor on prison health to AFEW International.
«During the workshop in Ghent we presented the position paper and asked for input to develop next steps. Furthermore, 2 speakers from Belgium presented their studies related to prison health.
It was clear from the discussion that prisoners have not the same rights to health and care as people outside the prisons. The Nelson Mandela rules are not followed in most of prison settings. In Belgium the right to privacy is violated, the doctor is not allowed to talk to the prisoner in private, there should always be a guard or nurse as well in the consultation room (for safety reasons). In the Netherlands care after office hours is not well organized. Triage is done in the first instance by the guard, and the second instance by the prison nurse.
Another important point for discussion was that throughcare, or transition client management, is not well organized. Local authorities don’t take up the responsibility to ensure that prisoners after their release are taken care of in society. Most of the throughcare relies on international NGOs like AFEW. Care in halfway houses is not sustainable, care relies very much on short-term financing structures/funds.
What can we conclude? We need more examples and good practices of throughcare. Scotland has as well advanced prison health care system, and we should dive into their practices. We need more research on which prison healthcare systems works well. We should get more insight into the advantages and disadvantages of different health systems. It is important to get a continuum of prison health care, after release, into primary health care and last but not least into community care.
We hope to be able to continue with the working group and go into the next phase in which we will gather good practices of prison health care and seek collaboration with other prison health initiatives».
