Prison Health Services Inc., which provides medical care to Maryland’s 24,000 inmates, has disciplined three nurses and a physician assistant at the Baltimore women’s detention center in connection with a 34-year-old woman whose death last month is being investigated by the state, says the Baltimore Sun. The woman died four days after being taken by ambulance from the jail to a hospital where doctors diagnosed an advanced case of cryptococcal meningitis. She had been experiencing fainting spells for several days by the time she was sent to the emergency room. Records also mention a head injury she apparently incurred in a jailhouse fight.
Prison Health Services, a subsidiary of American Service Group Inc., based in Brentwood, Tenn., said the four employees had been “reprimanded and assigned to new duties.” Prison Health Services faces harsh criticism for purported lapses in its institutional medical care. Palm Beach County, Fla., officials recently implicated the company in nine inmate deaths during the past two years. A report last June by the New York Commission on Correction blamed the company’s cost-cutting measures for an inmate’s death after his prescribed medication was withheld.
Link: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.jail20oct20,1,1724607.story?coll=bal-local-headlines