Health Behind Bars

In addition to her regular duties as Senior Lecturer in Rural Public Health Medicine, Dr Marisa Gilles provides clinical services and public health leadership in the WA prison system. The arrangement is made possible through a partnership with the Geraldton Regional Aboriginal Medical Service and the Ministry of Justice.

In 2004, Dr Gilles and Public Health Registrar Dr Hussein Farah set themselves the task of meeting the health needs of inmates of the Greenough Regional Prison in a systematic manner. International principals establish the right of prisoners to receive health care of a comparable quality to that available to the general population. Good prison health care has public health benefits as it provides an opportunity to return offenders to the community healthier than when they were first incarcerated. Drs Gilles and Farah undertook an audit that highlighted gaps in health delivery and weakness in the systems within the Ministry of Justice to monitor and deliver quality health care, especially in chronic disease identification and management. Since then funding for an additional medical session a week and an Aboriginal health worker has been made available. A start has already been made to provide dental care within the prison and protocols and systems are being developed to provide proactive rather than reactive health care.

The results of the audit and a related project to treat Hep-C infected prisoners have been presented at several national conferences. For more information contact Marisa Gilles.