RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE MINISTER OF CORRECTIONS: • Ensure professional independence and competence of the penitentiary healthcare personnel by fully incorporating the medical personnel’s professional independence principle and the medical ethics principles in the legal framework regulating the penitentiary system, providing the healthcare personnel with continuous professional training, enhancing various training modules for them, creating a mechanism for evaluating and supervising the sustainability of training results and elaborating clear job description. • Ensure that the regulatory unit of the Medical Department carries out strict supervision on the implementation of ethical principles by prison medical staff and treat violations adequately. • Make sure that a prisoner can contact the healthcare staff directly, without involvement of non-medical staff, including by installing calling buttons and obliging the healthcare staff to go round and inspect the cells every day in closed-type institutions. • Take necessary measures to ensure that any medical examination and medical consultation takes place in privacy, respecting the principle of confidentiality, in a doctor’s office, unless the situation is urgent and exceptional. • Take all necessary measures to involve patients in the provision of healthcare services to them by properly informing them about the services to be rendered; ensure prisoner access to health protection information, including information related to preventative health care PROPOSAL TO THE PARLIAMENT OF GEORGIA • Amend Article 24(2) of the Imprisonment Code abolishing a provision, which states that a medical account of a prisoner’s mandatory medical examination carried out on admission must be kept in the prisoner’s personal (non-medical) file. This information in any case should be kept in the prisoner’s medical records. NATIONAL PREVENTIVE MECHANISM (NPM), 2015 113