Health - Vacancies for prison doctors often remain unfilled
There are numerous vacancies for prison doctors across Germany. It is becoming increasingly difficult to guarantee medical care for prisoners, said Berlin prison doctor Karlheinz Keppler in the run-up to a conference in Frankfurt on December 7 and 8. Doctors and nurses from all over Germany are meeting for the eighth time at the "Prison Medicine Days".
There are only a few applicants for vacancies, Keppler told the German Press Agency (dpa). Doctors are particularly difficult to find. They have to be replaced by freelance staff, who are more expensive and often find it difficult to cope with the special conditions in prisons. But there are also many vacancies for nursing staff. One topic of the conference is resilience - how medical staff can better cope with the stressful working environment.
Addictions and mental health problems
According to Keppler, typical problems in prisons are addictions and mental health problems. In addition, inmates are getting older and older, which increases the need for treatment. "Imprisonment does not protect against cancer or other illnesses that become more common in old age," says Keppler. Inmates are not always released when they are seriously ill, "some also die in prison".
"Our main problem is addiction and drugs," said Keppler. A third of men and half of women are addicted to intravenous drugs. There are also other addictions such as alcohol. According to Keppler, opiate-dependent patients usually receive substitution therapy. However, they often also suffer from concomitant illnesses such as hepatitis, HIV or abscesses. In Keppler's view, prison is the wrong place for many of them: "It's nonsense to lock these addicts up."
Important social task
In his opinion, the same applies to many mentally ill prisoners. "We can't look after these patients properly in the prisons, but we can't get rid of them either because the psychiatric clinics won't take them off our hands."
Prison doctors fulfill an important social task: some prisoners receive appropriate medical care and social support for the first time in their lives. "Releasing prisoners into freedom healthy and with a new awareness of their health issues - society also benefits from this," said Keppler.
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Source: www.stern.de
