Media release

From: Medical Journal of Australia (MJA)

Shackling prisoners in palliative care must stop

There are urgent calls to abandon the restraining of prisoners receiving palliative care, with the ongoing practice blamed on the Australian justice and health systems colliding.

Prisoners receiving palliative care in Australia, either in a hospital or a palliative care unit, may still be subject to prison policies regarding restraint even though care is being provided outside of a prison environment, experts say.

“Health care professionals involved in caring for hospitalised prisoner patients [have] described a ‘seemingly opaque system’ around the protocols and points of contact for removing shackles,” wrote Lara Pemberton from the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University and colleagues in a Perspective, published in the Medical Journal of Australia today.

The processes for getting the shackles removed from a restrained prisoner is also “time-consuming and deliberative — time that a dying person may not have,” Ms Pemberton wrote.

In some jurisdictions in Australia, health care staff must follow formal pathways “to request a review of a patient’s risk assessment”.

While palliative care for prisoners is in the spotlight this week, there are again calls for prisoners to no longer be excluded from Medicare and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) subsidies.

Please remember to credit the MJA.

 The Medical Journal of Australia is a publication of the Australian Medical Association.

The statements or opinions that are expressed in the MJA reflect the views of the authors and do not represent the official policy of the AMA or the MJA unless that is so stated.