In 2015, the Public defender of Georgia recommended to the Minister of Corrections of Georgia to take necessary measures for ensuring that prescribed medicine was made available for prisoners. Furthermore, to ensure that doctors, upon necessity, were free to prescribe brand name drugs. According to the response received from the Ministry of Corrections on 25 November 2016, various health-care professionals prescribe medicines to prisoners in accordance with the basic drugs list elaborated within the penitentiary health-care system. In this list, the drugs are named according to the active ingredient for a particular disease. This means that both the active ingredient of the drugs with a generic name and other medicines with the same composition; both drugs have the same composition and treat the same disease. The difference is only in the name of the producing country and the name of a drug. Health-care professionals are not limited to prescribing the medicine that is on the basic drugs list elaborated by the penitentiary health-care system. Upon necessity and within their competence, doctors can also prescribe medicines that are not on the basic drugs list of the penitentiary health-care system. In such cases, a senior doctor files an individual request with the Medical Department of the Ministry of Corrections and the requested medicine is bought through a simple purchase procedure.277 A convict, in case of refusal to take provided medication, can, according to a doctor’s prescription, buy at his/her own expense the medication of the same clinical indications, among them, a medicine of a particular brand. As the monitoring of penitentiary establishments showed, medical personnel mostly prescribes to prisoners those generic medicines that are already available in the given penitentiary establishment, at the state’s expense. It is imperative that prisoners are allowed to purchase, with a doctor’s consent, a particular brand of medicine that corresponds to the initially prescribed medicine, in the given penitentiary establishment’s drug store or, if there is none, to get it through family members. It should be pointed out that there is a drug store in penitentiary establishments nos. 8 and 15 where prisoners can buy medicine on their own. As regards receiving medicine through a parcel, according to the information received from the Ministry of Corrections, the elaboration of the procedure for sending medicines in a parcel is under consideration. RECOMMENDATION TO THE MINISTER OF CORRECTIONS OF GEORGIA • To take necessary measures to ensure that prisoners have unimpeded access to prescribed medicine; to ensure that doctors are not limited to the medicines available in a penitentiary establishment and upon a prisoner’s request, with a doctor’s consent and at the prisoner’s expense, make immediately accessible medicines of particular brands; in those penitentiary establishments where there is no drug store, introduce a clear procedure for sending in medicines in a parcel; and • To take necessary measures to organise the provision of medicines in to eradicate shortcomings in the existing practice of supplying penitentiary establish277 The Law of Georgia on State Purchase, Article 101. NATIONAL PREVENTIVE MECHANISM (NPM), 2016 131