JEDDAH, 4 May 2008 — During a recent visit to the health care unit at Jeddah’s Briman Prison, an inmate as pale as a white sheet waved a small piece of paper at the city’ prisons director and mumbled a few words. The director inquired what was wrong with him. The prisoner replied, “I have tuberculosis.”
This inmate wanted to be transferred to a hospital outside the prison. The request was one among many heard during Arab News’ visit to the prison. (It took more than two months for the supervised visit to be approved.)
Briman Prison will soon open a recently completed quarantine facility for inmates. To augment this, the health care unit, a neighboring facility, has been equipped with the latest technology to examine the inmates and provide them needed medical care. The new unit was built mainly to prevent the spread of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases among the prison community.
The final touches are being made to the two-story quarantine unit next to the health care unit. “It is designed to accommodate 24 inmates at a time,” said the prison’s medical officer, Maj. Raid Al-Qahtani. “The unit will open very soon.”
The prison has about 6,000 inmates.
The quarantine area has been designed for inmates who have tuberculosis or tested HIV positive.
“Development of prison facilities is an ongoing process; it does not stop. An assessment is made of any situation and the problems are then solved,” said Gen. Ahmed Al-Zahrani, the director of prisons in Jeddah.
Al-Qahtani said that the prison had a team of six doctors. One of the doctors said his main task was to monitor and treat cases of tuberculosis inside the prison. He said that there were a total of 50 cases — more than double the number of beds available in the new health facility.
Requesting anonymity a doctor in King Fahd Hospital said that most of the time the isolation units at the hospital are full.
“The majority of the prison’s patients are transferred to the hospital,” he said. The health care unit consists of an internal medicine department as well as thoracic, dental and psychiatric departments, a laboratory and a radiology department. Spread over two floors, the ground floor was a beehive of inmates and trained staff while the top floor was empty except for chairs, administration offices and a psychiatrist.
“We have trained specialists working in each field,” Al-Qahtani said. He added that if a case needed to be transferred to a hospital outside, he would be transferred immediately based on the treating doctor’s recommendation.
The health care unit was full of inmates, shackled at the ankles, taking turns to be examined. During our visit accompanied by the prison director, a number of inmates continued to approach him with requests; he took time to listen to each one. Some inmates wanted to be transferred from their wards while others wanted to be admitted to hospitals outside the prison.
Al-Zahrani said inmates were part of society and it was their right to have the best care, whether for health, educational, psychiatric or social problems.
In an interview with Arab News, Hussain Al-Sharif, the director of the National Human Rights Commission in Jeddah, said that there had been a number of complaints against the prison service’s health care in the region, especially at Briman.
One complaint came from the family of an inmate who alleged that his treatment was delayed which resulted in severe health complications, he said.
According to the family, the man was repeatedly denied access to medical care allegedly because no officer was available to escort him to a hospital. During that time, the inmate’s health deteriorated further, the complaint said.
