Case Study
Sindy is a full-time nurse in a correctional facility. She has 10 years of experience working as a correctional nurse. Day after day, she starts her work by leaving her cell phone in her car in order to be able to enter the building. She shows her identification tag to the officer behind the first set of doors and only after that she is able to walk in and walk through. It is a routine process and she had already repeated it many times before starting her work day.While she was going through all these procedures,Sindy had a flashback to her first day there.She remembered how she was worried about her safety and the possibility of prisoners’ behavior, who can make gestures or inappropriate suggestions towards her because she is a female.
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 Today, at 10:00 a.m., her patient was Dan, a 37 year old man who was imprisoned earlier this year on a charge of indecent assault. He had a history of self-harm and also attempted suicide. In the prison, he continually makes what are deemed unrealistic demands. Today, he threatened the staff with self-harm because he made the assumption that he would be admitted to the healthcare centre if he injured himself. He also insisted on being prescribed the medications he preferred and to have unnecessary access to the prison’s healthcare services. |
When Sindy met with him, Dan was agitated. He did not listen to her and would not respond to her questions, instead constantly voicing his demands. She had to perform a health assessment and make her decision independently, because at that time there were no other healthcare staff members on site.As policy dictated, two correctional officers were constantly beside her for her safety.
Even though interacting with criminals could be threatening to her well-being and created challenges to providing health care properly, Sindy understands that her patients do not usually get much sympathy from the public and, just like any other patient, they still need a lot of care and compassion. She always applies the nursing ethical principal of being non-judgmental. She always tries to provide care according to professional standards of practice and put her feelings aside. She always feels some tension between security rules and the process of patient care; for example, sometimes she is not able to see her patients immediately because of prison timetables or security procedures. All of these factors affect her interactions with patients and ultimately impact patient care.
