Appointment notifications

In our facility each week day the med records office personel print the following day's appts, cut them into strips, which are then delivered to the various housing units by an officer. The slip only has the offender's name, date and time as well as the office they are to report to, nothing more. I work with one of the staff physicians and we don't begin appts til about 9am because he has to make rounds in the TCU (transitional care unit) which is a fancy term for med/surg floor, prior to beginnig the day's assigned appts.

This method works out very well for everyone concerned...

:) Nurse Suzy

I wanted to get some feedback from those working in major correctional institutions about the method used for notifying inmates of medical appointments.

The reason I am asking is that my facility has instituted a very time-consuming and, in my opinion, ineffective and wasteful system for notifying inmates. We once had a system where officers handed out individual appointment slips. This has been replaced with a system in which the nurse has to post appointment lists in every housing unit (after already walking the entire yard once for pill call) and taping notices to the wall in each quad.

Some of the appointments are for as early as 7:00 AM, and they are not the first thing inmates look at after being locked down all night. There is also the problem of notices being pulled down or falling off before they are seen, and I see a confidentiality problem with it. Any ideas?

Reply to ORCA:

Our state prison also posts these appointment lists. We post all Med Clinic appts., all Dental Clinic appts., all sick call appointments in the dorm nursing stations ( have 4 units of these, plus seg, which we give the posting list only to custody for ). The lists get made up and distributed by 2pm the day before appointments to the mailboxes of the dorm custody officers, who do the postings. We also post these lists in a locked outdoor bulletin board near the dining hall. Our prison is set up like a campus, and inmates are housed in dorms unless they are in segregation (then they are single-celled). They have jobs during the day and evening, attend college classes, GED training, etc, so they are out and about and can check out the list by the dining hall. This system has worked well for us for many years, with a population of inmates close to 1300. The only appointments we do not post, but use a call-up system for, are the specialty clinic appointments when we use contract providers from outside, who hold clinics at certain times of the month. Med Clinic handles these, too, and has to call each dorm to have the inmate report. It usually works out, also. Does that help at all? :)

My problem with the new system was not so much the system itself, but the mechanism that our supervisor chose to implement it - primarily his bullheaded insistence that the RNs walk the yard and physically post the messages - which took up about two hours of my night. I didn't exactly have two spare hours to do this. We were paying RNs $25 an hour to stick papers to a wall, when there were officers in the unit who were already there and could take care of it.

An update: about three weeks ago, my supervisor decided that the new system wasn't working, and went back to individual appointment slips, handed out by the unit officers. It was a big load off of us.