Margaret M. Collatt, BSN, RN, CCHP-RN/A, joined Lorry to talk about correctional nursing in the prison setting in this podcast from 2010. Margaret had nearly three decades of correctional healthcare experience at the time of the interview and was the Health Services Manager at the Oregon State Penitentiary for many years. In 2017 Margaret received the NCCHC Bernard P. Harrison Award of Merit. She passed away following a short illness in early 2018.
While many think that a prison and a jail are the same, they are actually quite different. Learn more about the specific differences in this post.
In this interview, Margaret shares her thoughts on job satisfiers for prison nursing, especially the autonomy of nursing practice. Protocols guide this autonomous practice and she describes the two types of protocols used in the Oregon system.
People who have good critical thinking skills and enjoy a variety of nursing will enjoy prison nursing. Margaret believes correctional nurses need to be lifelong learners and keep up on the latest practices and how they would apply in the correctional setting. She opines that correctional nurses need to have some maturity and be confident in their nursing skills. They also need to communicate well – both therapeutic and among the staff – health care and officers. A correctional nurse may be called upon to use prehospital, emergency, acute care, and case management skills.
Margaret describes key nursing care processes such as sick call and medication lines. Much patient teaching takes place during prison health care, especially during the sick call process. Medication lines can be as many as 300 people yet it is still critical to get all the medication administration ‘rights’ {here is a post on the ‘rights” of medication administration).
Caring in correctional nursing needs to be less demonstrative and physical than in other specialties. Margaret describes some examples of caring that may be quite appropriate in other settings but should be avoided in correctional nursing practice. For more on caring in correctional nursing, check out this post and this post.
Margaret was concerned that new prison nurses understand these important concepts:
- Personal Safety
- Critical Incident De-escalation
- Patient Advocacy
- Fairness (Don’t do for one that you can’t do for 3000)
- Patients vs Inmates
What do you think are the key components of prison nursing? How is it different from jail nursing? Share your thoughts in the comments of this post.
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