PROPOSAL TO THE PARLIAMENT OF GEORGIA: • To amend Article 24.2 of the Imprisonment Code to the effect of deleting the provision, under which the report of medical examination of an remand/convicted person upon his/her admission to a penitentiary institution shall be kept in his/her personal (non-medical) file. This report shall always be kept in a medical note of the prisoner. 3.9.5. MENTAL HEALTH AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE Mental healthcare is one the major challenges of the penitentiary healthcare. According to the information received from the Medical Department of the Ministry of Corrections of Georgia, the number of prisoners with mental health and behavioural disorders increased insignificantly compared to 2015. This indicator amounted to 1,031 by December 2015 and 1,079 by December 2016. Getting an appointment with a psychiatrist remains a problem. In a number of cases, the medical personnel, despite prisoners’ requests, do not give them appointments as they think the prisoners are pretending. Because of this, prisoners are frequently denied adequate psychiatric treatment. Apart from the need to improve the accessibility of a psychiatrist, it is also imperative to deepen their cooperation with psychologists and social workers to improve the indicator of identification of the prisoners with mental health problems and give them timely and adequate psychiatric care. It is also important to ensure that patients with acute psychosis receive psychiatric treatment in psychiatric and not in penitentiary establishments. According to the information received from the Ministry of Corrections, in 2016, psychiatrists gave 10,682 consultations.315 By December 2016, there were 1154 prisoners with mental health problems (F00-F99) in penitentiary establishments. In 2016, involuntary inpatient psychiatric treatment was administered to 45 prisoners and 58 prisoners were placed for compulsory psychiatric treatment in a hospital. The assessment of a prisoner’s mental health condition should be given particular importance during the primary medical examination upon the admission of a prisoner to a penitentiary establishment. Besides, the prisoners inclined towards auto-aggression, suicide and substance abuse should be a special target group for mental health screening. At the same time, it is necessary to assess the mental health condition of those prisoners that systematically manifest antisocial behaviour and there is a suspicion that such behaviour could be caused by their mental health condition. In the Parliamentary Report of 2015, the Public Defender of Georgia pointed out the importance of the creation of an effective mechanism for the identification of mental health problems to ensure that, instead of imposition of a disciplinary sanction for self-harm, violation of the regime and other disciplinary offences, timely and adequate treatment 315 The data on establishment no. 18 is not taken into account. NATIONAL PREVENTIVE MECHANISM (NPM), 2016 147