Gaining patients' trust and providing high-quality care is no easy feat for many healthcare organizations. This task is even less simple for those who provide hospice care in prisons, according to a new article published in The Atlantic.
The author, Ann Neumann, is a visiting scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and journalist with pieces published in The New York Times, the Nation and Guernica.
Ms. Neumann visited prison hospice programs and skilled nursing facilities. In her report, she highlighted some of the similarities between healthcare in the country and healthcare specifically provided to prisoners — including pain management and patient-physician relations — as well as the differences — including the unique power dynamic between the prisoners and clinicians.
Similar to the industry as a whole, care providers in prisons struggle to strike the balance between managing patients' pain and overprescribing narcotics and other pain medication.
"Pain management in a facility where drug use is rampant — and, indeed, a major cause of incarceration — is problematic," wrote Ms. Neumann. "Doctors and nurses can find it hard to believe a patient who tells them he's in pain."
The distrust goes both ways though — incarcerated patients find it hard to believe that clinical staff have their best interests at heart. This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that more than half of federal prisons require patients to sign do-not-resuscitate orders to receive care.
"Patient safety is tempered with a paternal 'we know what's good for you' attitude; prisoners who feel their lives are less valued think the system doesn't care about them or is invested in getting rid of them," according to Ms. Neumann.
To learn more about health and hospice care in U.S. prisons, and its financial costs, read the full feature here.
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