Prison Healthcare System Improvement

Offering analysis and technical assistance focused on improving prison healthcare with a focus on aging and serious illness.

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

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.

CalPROTECT Reports

• California State Prisons During the COVID-19 Pandemic (For a complete listing of this report with supporting documents, please visit the UCSF Criminal Justice & Health Program Reports section of https://cchcs.ca.gov/reports/.)
• Substance Abuse and Treatment Facility (SATF) Corcoran Site Visit Report
• Evaluation of the April-May 2020 COVID-19 Outbreak at California Men’s Colony
• Urgent Memo – COVID-19 Outbreak: San Quentin Prison

Healthcare System Reports

• Assessing Medical Systems for the California Prison Health Care Receivership Corporation: Mortality Review Policy and Practice
• Maintaining a Qualified Provider Workforce: Recruitment
• Assessing Medical Bed Utilization among Women in the CDCR

Correctional Healthcare

• The Ethical Use of Medical Isolation – Not Solitary Confinement – to Reduce COVID-19 Transmission in Correctional Settings
• Advance Care Planning (ACP) in Prison or Jail: Resources for Correctional Clinicians and Patients During COVID-19
• Webinar: Prognostication in Correctional Healthcare in the Setting of COVID-19