Background: Correctional systems in several U.S. states have entered into partnerships with Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) to provide healthcare for people who are incarcerated. This project was initiated to better understand medical trainee perspectives on training and providing healthcare services to prison populations at one AMC specializing in the care of incarcerated patients: The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB). We set out to characterize the attitudes and perceptions of medical trainees from the start of their training until the final year of Internal Medicine residency. Our goal was to analyze medical trainee perspectives on caring for incarcerated patients and to determine what specialized education and training is needed, if any, for the provision of ethical and appropriate healthcare to incarcerated patients. Results: We found that medical trainees grapple with being beneficiaries of a state and institutional power structure that exploits the neglected health of incarcerated patients for the benefit of medical education and research. The benefits include the training opportunities afforded by the advanced pathologies suffered by persons who are incarcerated, an institutional culture that generally allowed students more freedom to practice their skills on incarcerated patients as compared to free-world patients, and an easy compliance of incarcerated patients likely conditioned by their neglect. Most trainees failed to recognize the extreme power differential between provider and patient that facilitates such freedom.Conclusions: Using a critical prison studies/Foucauldian theoretical framework, we identified how the provision/ withholding of healthcare to and from persons who are incarcerated plays a major role in disciplining incarcerated bodies into becoming compliant medical patients and research subjects, complacent with and even grateful for delayed care, delivered sometimes below the standard best practices. Specialized vulnerable-population training is sorely needed for both medical trainees and attending physicians in order to not further contribute to this exploitation of incarcerated patients.

Correctional systems in several U.S. states have entered into partnerships with academic medical centers (AMCs) to provide healthcare for persons who are incarcerated. One AMC specializing in the care of incarcerated patients is the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB), which hosts the only dedicated prison hospital in the U.S. and supplies 80% of the medical care for the entire Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). Nearly all medical students and residents at UTMB take part in the care of the incarcerated. This research, through qualitative exploration using focus group discussions, sets out to characterize the correctional care learning environment medical trainees enter. Participants outlined an institutional culture of low prioritization and neglect that dominated the learning environment in the prison hospital, resulting in treatment of the incarcerated as second-class patients. Medical learners pointed to delays in care, both within the prison hospital and within the TDCJ system, where diagnostic, laboratory, and medical procedures were delivered to incarcerated patients at a lower priority compared to free-world patients. Medical learners elaborated further on ethical issues that included the moral judgment of those who are incarcerated, bias in clinical decision making, and concerns for patient autonomy. Medical learners were left to grapple with complex challenges like the problem of dual loyalties without opportunities to critically reflect upon what they experienced. This study finds that, without specific vulnerable populations training for both trainees and correctional care faculty to address these institutional dynamics, AMCs risk replicating a system of exploitation and neglect of incarcerated patients and thereby exacerbating health inequities.

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