Report on the Performance of Activities of the National Preventive Mechanism for 2015 An additional problem is the fact that prison physicians cannot write referral slips or prescriptions for medications that would be accepted by external medical institutions. They are written by elected physicians that all persons deprived of liberty Prison physicians cannot should have. Because of that, nurses and physicians spend a lot write referral slips or of their working hours contacting elected physicians and prescriptions that would collecting referral slips and prescriptions, and sometimes even be accepted by external visiting those physicians in person, which significantly reduces medical institutions, but their ability to perform actual healthcare tasks. According to the rather these have to be COPSD instruction of 2014, penal institutions have to written by elected independently contact regional CHIF offices and arrange the physicians that all implementation of prisoners’ healthcare with physicians, persons deprived of their according to the area where the penal institution is located. liberty should have. However, the instruction is really vague in the part pertaining to selection and cooperation with elected physicians, so much of the burden is shifted to those who work in healthcare in each individual penal institution. Specifically, in some areas it is easier to find an elected physician, whereas in others, such as Zagreb for example, it is extremely difficult because the physicians generally have a sufficient number of patients and cannot accept new ones. Furthermore, some may be prepared to come to the penal institution, but most require that the prisoner be brought to them for examination, which represents an additional burden for the judicial police, and also makes provision of healthcare to prisoners more complicated, especially in emergency situations. Healthcare providers schedule prisoners for specialist examinations via the central referral system, the same way all other patients are scheduled. Taking into consideration the waiting lists for individual specialist examinations and the inability (for security reasons) to reveal the scheduled examination date to the prisoners, it is no surprise that sometimes they are revolted by how long they have to wait to have certain examinations done. Sometimes the penal institutions cannot take the prisoners to the already scheduled specialist examinations to external hospitals because judicial police officers are engaged for court hearings. So, for example, in Zagreb County Prison, in one day but at different times of day, there were 48 instances where prisoners were taken out of the prison to 21 different places, and on another day there were 79 of such instances. For that reason, between 1 and 20 March 2015, six prisoners were not taken to their scheduled specialist examinations. An additional problem is the fact that, based on the number of inmates, Zagreb County Prison lacks about thirty judicial officers, and a similar situation is also present in Lepoglava State Prison. Consequently, the vacant job positions need to be filled so that such organizational problems that result in violation of the prisoners’ rights could be reduced to a minimum. Nurses in most penal institutions work in two shifts, which ensures that medications are dispensed by healthcare providers, for example, in Lepoglava State Prison and in Zagreb County Prison. In some penal institutions, for example in Šibenik County Prison, healthcare providers 9