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NCCHC News
It’s Official: New AMA
Policy Backs NCCHC Standards, Accreditation
The American Medical Association has adopted a policy of support
for the National Commission on Correctional Health Care’s
standards for health services and its accreditation program. The
policy “encourage[s] all correctional systems to support NCCHC
accreditation,” and calls for finding ways to increase funding
for correctional health services.
Resolution 440 (A-04), Support for Health Care Services to
Incarcerated Persons, was adopted by the AMA’s House of
Delegates at its annual meeting in June. The House of Delegates
is the association’s principal policy-making body.
The policy was introduced by the American Association of Public
Health Physicians, which holds a seat on the House of Delegates.
AAPHP also is a supporting organization of the National
Commission.
Improvement Needed
According to a report in AMA News, physicians widely supported
the policy in part because of “recognition that illness in
prison can spill over to affect the community at large.”
The resolution, which describes NCCHC as “the leading
organization working to improve the quality” of correctional
health care, cites powerful arguments for the policy—
including the fact that the U.S. Surgeon General views this as
an important public health issue. Other key concerns include the
following:
• Correctional health
care should meet prevailing community standards, and providers
should practice in keeping with contemporary standards.
• Incarcerated people
have a high prevalence of disease and serious mental illness, as
reported in NCCHC’s Health Status of Soon-to-Be-Released
Inmates study.
• “Drastically
curtailed” correctional budgets have resulted in
“insufficient resources.”
A Long History
“The AMA has for over 30 years strongly supported the need for
improved health and mental health care in jails and prisons,”
says Jonathan B. Weisbuch, MD, MPH, who is AAPHP’s delegate to
the AMA. He also serves on NCCHC’s board of directors.
The AMA and NCCHC have a long history dating to 1970, when the
medical association first began to look into the conditions of
health services in jails and didn’t like what it found. The
AMA collaborated with other organizations in a program to
establish jail health care standards and advise on
accreditation. In the early 1980s, that program evolved into the
independent NCCHC.
“Those of us who labor in the vineyards of correctional
medicine and public health thank the AAPHP for introducing the
resolution and the AMA for adopting it,” Weisbuch adds.
The resolution is posted online at www.ama-assn.org/meetings/public/annual04/440a04.doc.
However, this version does not contain the sole amendment to the
resolution, which expands the phrase “health care services”
by adding “including mental health services.”
[This article first appeared in the
Spring 2004 issue of CorrectCare.]
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