Article summary: "Do prisoners Trust the Healthcare System?"

The "Do prisoners trust the healthcare system?" article by Vandergrift & Christopher, (2021), aims to examine the level at which prisoners trust the healthcare system. Most incarcerated individuals have experienced abuse, trauma, substance abuse, chronic illnesses, severe mental illnesses, and infectious diseases that could further deteriorate their health if they do not access quality healthcare. However, the prisons tend to consist of more black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) who, even outside prisons, face challenges in accessing healthcare (Vandergrift & Christopher, 2021). Therefore, poor healthcare outcomes in prisons could be based on the issue of structural racism. For instance, the BIPOC individuals are more targeted by the policies and laws established and hence end up in prisons. In addition, there has been inequitable distribution of housing, employment, education, credit, media, and benefits, leading to high poverty levels among the BIPOC. Other barriers to providing quality and adequate healthcare in prison include the complexity of health issues of the prisoners, lack of adequate financial resources, and lack of advanced medical equipment (Vandergrift & Christopher, 2021). In addition, the prisons' main aim is to provide safety, rehabilitation, and punishment; hence, the healthcare system is not a priority. Also, correctional policies such as accompaniment by an officer to the medical examination room and interviews could lead to non-disclosure of some health details. Therefore, all these conditions in the correctional centers lead to a lack of trust in the healthcare system by the prisoners. The study's results indicated a moderate positive relationship between age and distrust, with the main concern being the healthcare system's competency and the ability to offer patient-centered care (Vandergrift & Christopher, 2021). However, the issue of ethnicity and race was not highly associated with the overall district, but distrust of the system's competence was high among the non-Latinx. Therefore, competence was the core root of distrust of the prison's healthcare system. In addition, the research indicates that the high levels of competence district hindered some patients, such as women, from getting cervical cancer screening or prostate cancer screening for males due to the belief that physicians are ineffective and incompetent in their operations. Also, respondents between the age of 33-42 presented higher distrust of the system (Vandergrift & Christopher, 2021). Also, older prisoners were more vulnerable to chronic illnesses, while middle-aged prisoners were more in need of healthcare services due to many health issues. However, the study findings are crucial in identifying the various factors contributing to the distrust in healthcare to establish a basis for improving the healthcare system and the prison conditions to enhance the prisoner's wellbeing.

However, addressing the issue of distrust in the healthcare system could be difficult due to complex underlying factors such as structural racism and social injustices. However, the study's limitation was that it used a small sample size from a single prison system; hence, the results cannot be generalized (Vandergrift & Christopher, 2021). In addition, there was no consideration of past utilization of the healthcare systems. In addition, the tools used to measure the level of distrust were not validated for utilization in a prison setting. Therefore, further examination of the healthcare distrust problem could help establish validated measuring tools among the prisoners (Vandergrift & Christopher, 2021). Also, further examination of factors such as the prisoner's stay, inside and outside carceral healthcare, quality of healthcare, and their impact on trust should be conducted. In addition, there is a need for more studies to establish the various methods of combating inequity and structural racism in prison to enhance the healthcare provided.

References

Vandergrift, L., & Christopher, P. (2021, July 03). Do prisoners trust the healthcare system? - health & justice. healthandjusticejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40352-021-00141-x