As a program in the UCSF School of Medicine, Amend draws on the expertise of colleagues, educational initiatives, and quality-improvement practices throughout the university to guide improvements in prison health care systems. This category of our work focuses primarily on educational initiatives, which train correctional staff, including health care and custody professionals, to meet the basic needs of older adults and patients with serious illness in prison. We also lead initiatives around system-level change, such as optimizing mortality review processes, providing trusted information about COVID-19 vaccines to incarcerated patients.
CalPROTECT (California Prison Roadmap for Targeting Efforts to Address the Ecosystem of COVID Transmission) is a multidisciplinary initiative that includes public health experts, clinicians, and scientists in behavior, environmental engineering, and economics at Amend at UCSF, University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley. The project collects information on how COVID-19 is transmitted in CDCR/CCHCS facilities and integrate into that knowledge the experiences and perspectives of correctional and facility staff, medical staff and patients to give correctional leaders and policymakers the scientific evidence they need to optimize the health and dignity of those who live and work in CDCR facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.