Patient Safety and People Who Are Incarcerated

Hamish Robertson, Deborah Debono and Joanne F. Travaglia

A chapter in Contemporary Topics in Patient Safety - Volume 2 from IntechOpen

Abstract: We explore a number of key relationships between patient safety and the health status of imprisoned people. This is a conceptual study drawing connections between a number of literatures including the field of patient safety, the work done on health and illness amongst imprisoned people, their social characteristics, and the carceral environment itself. We show that this is an underexplored and under-theorised field of inquiry. It also sets the scene for further investigation of not only individual and systemic factors in the health and illness experienced by such people but the role of the carceral environment. It seems clear that the risk of ill-health rises for many people who are incarcerated. Errors of both omission and commission are common in carceral environments. Risks rise for patients in such environments due to delays in diagnosis, referral and treatment. Understanding the complex and inter-related factors that increase ill-health in individuals, groups and communities provides a starting point for understanding why, when and how imprisoned people need to access and utilise healthcare, how will they are when they do so, and how. It also opens up the question of how these factors might affect their susceptibility to medical errors and adverse events.

Keywords: iatrogenesis; patient safety; carcerality; prisoners; incarceration; social determinants of health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/85119 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:283056

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.108942

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from IntechOpen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Slobodan Momcilovic ().