Protection of Healthcare in Penitentiary System and Torture Prevention Mechanisms
With regard to professional competence, more or less lack of awareness regarding healthcare regulation normative
acts and laws currently in force in Georgia was revealed in the majority of establishments of the penitentiary system
of Georgia, except for N5 women establishment. The issue of awareness of standards of the medical ethics, playing
the decisive role in raising of interpersonal conflicts between a doctor and a patient, is also very problematic. A
problem arises also with attitude of medical personnel towards disclosure, documentation, diagnostics and treatmentrehabilitation of facts of torture and level of their awareness of this in the majority of establishments. It needs to be
noted that even after the events when inmates openly and without concealment stated about torture and presented
various healthcare-related complaints prison doctors still failed to record such information in medical cards. To our
question why inmates’ stories and complaints were not recorded in the medical history, we were told at one of the
establishments that” such issues do not concern doctors”. The level of qualification when it comes to mental health
issues is very low among penitentiary system doctors, including psychiatrists. The above is confirmed by results of the
monitoring of those inmates suffering from psychosis that were discovered by us in the penitentiary system and who
before were diagnosed with nervous and other disorders of non-psychosis type. During the monitoring we discovered
9 such inmates.
On this background, we believe, that necessity of transfer of the penitentiary healthcare system of Georgia to civil
sector is of utmost importance. Also it is very important to urgently plan and implement a set of professional trainings
within the complex module program to acquaint prison doctors with torture prevention, documentation, as well as
ethical and international standards of penitentiary healthcare system.
2012
NPM Report
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