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Louisiana Bars Problem Doctors From Practicing Medicine In Most Hospitals. So They Treat Incarcerated People Instead. [1]

['Addy Baird', 'Buzzfeed News Reporter']

Date: 2024-07 

In February 2010, according to the report, a healthy man at Angola was playing football when he suffered a neck injury that left him paralyzed. As of 2016, he was living in the hospital ward at the prison, where, he told the inspectors, he was held in a locked isolation room with no call system and no way to notify the nurses if the tube in his trachea became clogged and he was struggling to breathe.

“The solid door is locked and the nurses cannot hear him even if he screams,” the report stated. The man also told the inspectors that inmate orderlies, rather than the medical staff, did “everything for him,” including bathing and turning him, and that if he was asleep when breakfast was served, no one woke him up. He was offered no occupational or recreational therapy, and at the time he was interviewed said it had been two weeks since his hair was last washed.

In another instance documented in the review, medical records showed that a patient with AIDS was said to have been administered medication for four days after he had died, evidence that the prison’s medication records were unreliable, the medical experts wrote.

Despite the 2016 findings at Angola, Lavespere was promoted to interim department medical director last year. He took the job permanently in January 2021.

Some of the most severely ill or injured patients at the state prisons end up at Tulane University hospital. One doctor there, Anjali Niyogi, told BuzzFeed News that many of the incarcerated people she treats at the hospital for conditions like heart failure and lung disease should’ve been brought in much sooner. In the majority of cancer cases, she said, by the time she sees the patient, it’s too late, and the cancer has already metastasized, despite patients telling her that they had complained for years to prison doctors that they needed care.

“By the time that they have lost function of their legs, for instance, and they finally come to the hospital and we do an MRI and we see that there’s just metastatic disease throughout the spine, and at that point there is nothing we can do to regain function of the legs, nor is there anything we can do to really cure the cancer,” she said.

The Department of Corrections said they could neither confirm nor deny Niyogi’s allegations, saying that no specific issue had been brought by her to the state.

“The DOC makes every effort to transport offenders to­­ tertiary hospitals in a timely manner when a higher level of care is indicated,” the department spokesperson said. “It is our goal to deliver the standard of care in each case.”

Health risks at the state’s prisons were already high long before anyone had heard of the coronavirus — and when the pandemic began its spread, there were few places in the country worse to be than a Louisiana state prison.

Because of COVID, many of the patients Niyogi said she was seeing with chronic diseases or conditions that required specialists were not provided transportation to outside appointments or even to telemedicine centers for virtual visits, leaving their needs untreated — and their care solely in the hands of prison physicians. ●

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[1] Url: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/addybaird/louisiana-prison-doctors-licenses-suspended

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