Meanwhile, the county was also struggling to find a new medical director. As nurses burn out, the county requires more mandatory overtime, which in turn makes it more difficult to recruit replacements. This fiscal year, the county estimates it will have mandated that nurses work overtime 600 times. The resulting delays in care, they said, were a safety issue-and mandatory overtime had become the new normal rather than the exception. Last fiscal year, 24% of corrections nursing positions were vacant.Ī recent survey of nearly 40 corrections nurses by their union found only 20% were satisfied with their jobs. It was dealing with “chronic vacancies” among frontline nurses, director Myque Obiero told county commissioners. By 2022, Corrections Health was struggling to hire staff across its organizational chart. The pandemic has caused health care staffing shortages nationwide, and Multnomah County is no exception. But not Multnomah, which delegates the task to its health department, spending $31.5 million a year to do it. Many, including Clackamas and Washington counties, outsource the job to for-profit companies that are frequently accused of providing substandard care. Federal insurance programs like Medicaid do not cover people in jail, and so local authorities must come up with the money themselves. Portland’s jails treat over 36,000 people every year. For many people, their only contact with a doctor is after they’re arrested. In Portland, like elsewhere in the country, jails are the health care provider of last resort.

It’s a difficult and often thankless job-entry-level nurses are currently paid nearly $5 less per hour than their counterparts at some Providence hospitals, says Kevin Mealy, a spokesman for their union.īut it is also a crucial one, and employees tell WW they take pride in doing it. So, Multnomah County has built medical clinics in its jails and hired teams of nurses and clinicians to staff them. In Portland, more than 30% of people in jail have mental health issues. The people who arrive at their doors often come with traumatic injuries or chronic, untreated conditions. INVERNESS JAIL: A recently retired staff doctor described to WW the problems at Portland’s troubled jails. “But we also know that the work our employees continue to do every day saves lives.” “Corrections Health agrees that the more staff and resources we have to serve our clients, the more we can do to help them and keep people healthy,” it reads, in part. In a separate statement, the county health department also acknowledged the problem. “I will continue to focus efforts across the county to support this team.” “Corrections Health is a challenging place to work and definitely needs additional staff,” she said, offering a laundry list of initiatives she’s supporting to increase staff, including budget increases, pay raises and retention bonuses. In a statement to WW, Vega Pederson conceded the staffing problem is real. But jail doctors are hired and fired by the Multnomah County Health Department, overseen by County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson. Jail conditions are the responsibility of Sheriff Nicole Morrissey O’Donnell. But, jail staff say, the facilities haven’t felt safe. No one is alleging that errors in patient care led to inmate deaths. Meanwhile, there’s been such a shortage of frontline nurses that those who remain are often required to work 16-hour double shifts, a practice the state prohibits at public and private hospitals. As a result, medical appointments became scarce and wait times to see a doctor sometimes extended to more than a month. The county scrambled to hire a single replacement from a staffing agency, but she was quickly overwhelmed, staff says. For a few weeks over the summer, there wasn’t a single psychiatric nurse practitioner left working in the buildings, staff tells WW. The lack of physicians was compounded by a shortage of specialized health care providers, who prescribe psychiatric medications for inmates who demonstrate mental illness-nearly a third of the jail population.

Multnomah county jail jail roster