Improving care for the overlooked in oncology: incarcerated patients.

Abstract

Physicians and public health practitioners often view health disparities through the eyes of birthplace, race, sex, economic class, sexuality, religion, or neighbourhood, or a combination of these. In the process, patients who are incarcerated (too often referred to as prisoners rather than patients) 1 Tran NT Baggio S Dawson A et al. Words matter: a call for humanizing and respectful language to describe people who experience incarceration. BMC Int Health Hum Rights. 2018; 18: 41 Crossref PubMed Scopus (31) Google Scholar are overlooked as a profoundly medically vulnerable population with substantial disparities in health care and their health is an understudied public health crisis. 2 Ahalt C Wang EA Williams B State of research funding from the National Institutes of Health for Criminal Justice Health Research. Ann Intern Med. 2015; 163: 240-241 Crossref PubMed Google Scholar Although a third of illness-related deaths in US state prisons are due to cancer, and this mortality rate is double for incarcerated male patients, 3 Noonan M Mortality in state prisons, 2001–2014 – statistical tables. US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/msp0114st.pdfDate: December, 2016 Date accessed: September 5, 2019 Google Scholar few recommendations exist to guide oncologists in how to address the unique challenges of providing ethically competent and high quality cancer care for incarcerated patients. Correction to Lancet Oncol 2019; 20: 1342–44Oladeru OT, Perni S, Williams B. Improving care for the overlooked in oncology: incarcerated patients. Lancet Oncol 2019; 20: 1342–44—In this Comment, the formatting in the panel was incorrect. This correction has been made to the online version as of Dec 2, 2019. Full-Text PDF