The health of people in Australia's prisons 2022

Improving the health of people in prison is a part of improving public health overall, so barriers to the use of health services by people in prison need to be minimised wherever possible. Barriers might be:

• physical – such as not being able to attend a consultation due to time constraints, lack of transport or lack of services
• psychosocial – where an individual feels stigmatised or intimidated, where culturally appropriate care is unavailable, or where an individual feels discouraged from seeking treatment.

Barriers to receiving specialist treatment might be particularly problematic for people in prison, especially if the person is required to travel out of the prison.

Prisons entrants needing to see a health professional in previous 12 months

Prison entrants were questioned about seeing a health professional in the previous 12 months, either in the community or in prison for those who said they had been incarcerated at some stage in the previous year.

Entrants were asked if, during the previous 12 months, they needed to see a health professional but did not. If this was the case, they were asked why. 

About one-third (36%) of prison entrants reported they did not see a GP in the previous 12 months despite needing to – similar to the proportion of people aged 15 and over in the general community who also did this (28%) (ABS 2022).

When asked why they did not see a health professional in the community when needed, prison entrants were able to select multiple reasons. The most common reasons cited were that:

• they felt they didn’t need to, they didn’t want to or they couldn’t be bothered (46%)
• the waiting time was too long or the health professional was not available at the time required (34%)
• they were too busy (30%)
• they were affected by alcohol or other drugs (27%)

Despite needing to, about 1 in 7 (15%) prison entrants said they did not see a GP in prison, and 1 in 20 (4.6%) reported not seeing a dentist in prison.