The professional perspective on health care for people deprived of their liberty: an integrative review

Abstract

The imprisonment system can be marked by a set of factors that hinder the re-socialization of the individual and the integral access to health, revealing issues that affect the assistance and hinder the performance of health professionals. Therefore, this text aims to describe the vision of professionals from different areas of health regarding the care of people deprived of liberty through the reading of articles. The integrative review was built based on a search in the Medline, PubMed, and Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences databases, using the descriptors ‘education’, ‘medical’, ‘health personnel’, and ‘prisoners’, selecting articles published in the last ten years. After the exclusion step, 68 references were read in full, resulting in 13 selected studies. Three categories were defined based on the identification of the most frequent themes in the publications: stigma, barriers to care, and mental health. It is concluded that there are still important gaps in the adequate training for the care of people deprived of liberty, since stigmas and barriers in the system hinder the mental health of this vulnerable group in the scope of integral access to health.

Keywords:
medical education; prisoners; health care personnel; health policy