National Preventive Mechanism Healthcare and medical care in prison Importance of quality assurance Inadequate healthcare can result in situations of inhuman and degrading treatment. Therefore, in 2014 the NPM again addressed the question of how to guarantee that medical care for inmates is at the same level as for persons at liberty. There is a need for professional oversight of the physicians at penal institutions and institutions for the detention of mentally ill offenders for quality assurance purposes. The NPM has long requested the establishment of an office of a medical superintendent, equipped with wide-reaching authority. Medical superintendent only provisional arrangement The Federal Ministry of Justice has only partially complied with this request. The position of “medical superintendent in the prison administration” was advertised in January 2014. However, the procedure had still not been completed in early November 2014. For this reason, the office of a medical superintendent has only been established on a provisional basis for the present and its authority is governed by decree. A medical superintendent is available to correctional institutions for 20 hours per week. As an employee of the Care Department, the medical superintendent has access to the Federal Electronic File Management Project. Work orders are assigned by the department head. 142 Centralised control The medical superintendent primarily assumes the healthcare tasks to be performed by the highest prison authority (Section 66 et seq. of the Penitentiary System Act). This includes developing guidelines for the medical treatment of inmates, standards for equipping practising rooms, for medication and for the practice of prescribing medicines that require approval. Advising Another area of responsibility is providing (operational and strategic) advice to the Federal Ministry of Justice and the prison administration on medical care matters. The medical superintendent is the contact person for the physicians working in correctional institutions and is responsible for approving the prescription of specific medicines, rehabilitation measures and prosthetics. To ensure efficient use, audits of the consumption of medicines and the billing of medical services are conducted on an ongoing basis. Management Under a centralised country-wide hospital bed management system, the medical superintendent makes authorisations and decides whether a particular inmate should be placed into a public medical facility, into the locked sections of the Krems or Vienna Barmherzige Brüder medical facilities or into the special medical facilities at the Stein and Vienna-Josefstadt correctional institutions. It also supervises and controls the recovery progress of prisoners (duration of stay/external costs). Technical opinions The tasks to be performed by the medical superintendent also include drafting and approving the statements regarding the medical care of inmates made by correctional institution medical services to courts, authorities, the NPM