Correctional Nursing Essay

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Correctional nursing Name Institution Correctional nursing is the provision of nursing services to clients in correctional facilities (Hitchcock, Schubert & Thomas, 2003). Such facilities normally house incarcerated individuals and they include jails, juvenile detention centers and prisons. Hitchcock, Schubert and Thomas (2003) assert that the people held in such facilities are normally perceived to be societal outfits due to the fact that they might have been involved in the commitment of one sort or crime or the other. Incarceration therefore implies that these people are kept away from the mainstream society and therefore are denied an opportunity to have normal social relations with the otherwise normal population of the society and according to Hitchcock, Schubert and Thomas (2003), this results in the individuals developing antisocial behavior such as being overly manipulative, lacking compassion for others or lacking the normal communication skills and therefore correctional nurses must be adequately equipped to deal with such kinds of antisocial behavior. Correctional nursing is an area in nursing that has evolved over the years from simply practice of providing basic healthcare to inmates to a practice that now involves the provision of specialized healthcare to inmates so as to ensure that the inmates are in good health both during and after their incarceration. Muse (2009) points out that the development of correctional nursing as a practice of nursing can be traced back to the 1970s when for the first time, initial steps were taken towards standardizing the quality of healthcare offered to inmates. Before this time, the field of correctional nursing per se did not exist and most penal institutions adopted various ways of addressing inmates’ medical complications with some relying on the services of occasional physicians

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