HYDERABAD: Most often in the central and other prisons in the state, it is the prisoners who don the role of doctors and give medical treatment to their co-prisoners.
No, its not a vocational training or short term course in first aid for prison inmates.
These prisoners have been forced to take upon the role of the friendly physician due to lack of qualified medical staff in prisons, which house over thousands of prisoners.
These ‘doctors’ not only provide basic first-aid medication for minor cuts and wounds but their range of medical services may include an occasional minor surgery as well! It is thus no wonder that death rates and illnesses, both physical and mental, are rising in prisons.
In the past six months, 58 prison inmates in state have died due to lack of medical facilities and natural deaths.
80 per cent of the deaths in prison are due to lack of medical treatment at the right time.
86 prisoners died in 2010, 116 in 2009, 132 in 2008 and 110 in 2007 in all the prisons in state.
95 per cent of deaths were in the seven central prisons - Chelrapally, Chanchelguda, Warangal, Rajamundry, Visakhapatnam, Cuddapah and Nellore, prison records reveal.
Medical services from routine health check-ups to counselling are thrust upon the hands of inexperienced inmates, some of who lack education beyond class 10.
Pendela Ganga Raju (32) Karimnagar district, was one such ‘doctor’ at the Cherlapally Central Prison.
A class 10 failed, he was recently released from prison after nine years of incarceration.
“During my imprisonment, I worked as a housekeeper at the prison health centre for the first year.
From the second year onwards, I was given a chance by the prison doctor to do checkups and give injections to patients.
I also used to do small surgeries when the inmates were injured.” he said.
He added that he soon started prescribing medicines in the absence of the doctor.
There were only two physicians and no male nursing orders (MNO) in the prison which housed 2,125 inmates.
“For the last four years of my imprisonment, I was ordered by prison officials and the doctor counsel inmates who were suffering from mental illnesses.
There was no psychiatrist in the prison.” Raju added that there were about five inmates like him who were not very educated but worked in the health centre as ‘doctors’ and ‘psychiatrists’.
The lack of medical staff hounds almost every prison in the state.
No prison has a laboratory for primary tests.
There are not enough doctors in view of the number of prisoners.
There is no paramedical team.
“Other prisons don’t have even that much,” he added.
Raja Mahesh, in-charge superintendent of Cherlapally says that complicated cases are referred to other hospitals like Gandhi Hospital or in cases of mental illnesses, the Institute of Mental Health in Erragadda.
“The government had planned to set up laboratories and medical facilities and increase the number of doctors in prisons a couple of years ago.
But it might take some more months,” he said.
Every day, the central jail prisoners are taken to the Institute of Mental Health for treatment which the prison is unable to provide, said Dr K Sankar Rao, civil assistant surgeon at Chanchalguda central prison.
“Even with such a wide range of problems, central prisons do not have an inhouse psychiatrist.” However, inmates of the prison allege that the jail authorities have always been making empty promises of appointing doctors to treat the patients.
When inmates with little medical knowledge refuse to act as doctors, they are bullied by the jail officials, they allege.