Medical care
Health services in prison
Justice Health, which is a business unit in the Department of Justice and Community Safety, is responsible for planning, coordinating and overseeing the delivery of health services to courts, police cells, and Victoria’s public and private prisons.
Justice Health contracts with a range of public and private health service providers who are in turn responsible for delivering primary health services in Victorian prisons.
Each prison in Victoria is supposed to offer a range of health care treatment, including podiatry, physiotherapy, hearing tests, diabetes education, asthma education, and immunisation programs. People in prison are not eligible for Medicare while in prison.
Some prisons have Aboriginal liaison officers who can assist with access to culturally appropriate services.
General practitioners and qualified mental health nurses provide mental health care at all prisons in Victoria. Most prisons also receive specialist support from visiting psychiatrists.
People in prison who require compulsory mental health care are transferred to the Thomas Embling Hospital under the Mental Health and Wellbeing Act 2022 (Vic). Compulsory treatment is not provided in prisons in Victoria.
For men, the Acute Assessment Unit at the Melbourne Assessment Prison is a special mental health unit that provides ongoing treatment for men in prisons with serious psychiatric conditions. The St Paul’s Unit at the Port Phillip Prison provides a recovery and rehabilitation program for adult men in prisons with significant mental health issues. Men in prisons can also access ongoing treatment for psychiatric problems at the Thomas Embling Hospital. Ravenhall Correctional Centre has inpatient and outpatient forensic mental health services.
Women with serious psychiatric conditions who require ongoing treatment can be treated in the Marrmak Unit at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, or in the Thomas Embling Hospital.
If a person enters prison while already on methadone or buprenorphine, they may continue to receive this therapy through the Opioid Substitution Therapy Program (OSTP). People entering prison who wish to commence opioid substitution therapy in prison should be assessed for eligibility for the OSTP. In practice, this can mean delays accessing opioid substitution therapy and restrictions regarding access. The 2022 Coronial Inquest into the Death of Veronica Nelson was highly critical of the operation of the OSTP in Dame Phyllis Frost Centre finding that ‘Justice Health’s [OSTP Guidelines] in so far as they restrict access to pharmacotherapy, deny prisoners equivalent care to that available in the community’ [finding 16]. As a result of recommendations made in that Inquest, the OSTP Guidelines are currently under review.
Private medical practitioner
Under section 47(1)(f) of the Corrections Act, people in prison in Victoria have:
The right to have access to reasonable medical care and treatment necessary for the preservation of health including, with the approval of the principal medical officer but at the prisoner’s own expense, a private registered medical practitioner, physiotherapist or chiropractor chosen by the prisoner.
‘Application to consult a private practitioner’ forms are available to people in prison. Applications must be signed by the prison’s health service manager, then sent to Justice Health for approval.
