Correctional Medicine

[lauracdahl]

I keep seing jobs posted in correctional medicine offering top-notch pay. Does anyone have any experience in correctional medicine that they can share with me? Pros vs cons? Also opinions on being a female PA in that field?

 

Thanks.

[emfdj]

Do a search on correctional medicine and you'll find a post where I describe what it's been like for me in a federal peniteniary. Are the jobs you're seeing state corrections? My job is federal so the pay isn't that great. But I am getting student loan repayment through the National Health Service Corps so it worth it for me.

 

I've been at the pen for over a year now and to update my prior posting: I spend too much time doing non-PA stuff--things an MA, pharm tech, or custody officer could do. It's not an efficient system and I find myself getting bored. But I've seen some very interesting things too. And most of the inmates are very apppreciative of the care I can give them.

 

Bottom line: I'm going to stay here until my loans are repaid and then I'll move on. I want more experience than I can get where I am now. I'm working parttime in urgent care now so I'll be able to transition into that when I'm ready.

[EMEDPA]

A good friend of mine has 2 part time correctional jobs at min security state facilities. Both require "availability" of 4 hrs/week..his choice of hrs....so he shows up whenever it's convenient, says " i'm available for the next 4 hrs"...sees whoever shows up, then leaves...if it's 4 hrs, it's 4 hrs...if he works 1-2 hrs he gets paid for 4 as he was "available for 4".

16 hrs "availability"/mo gets him 2k/mo from each place. Works out to well over 125/hr.

he does this in addition to a regular full time job.

the federal place near me pays 75/hr. for per diem folks.

[rojoflores]

I have been a Deputy Sheriff for 13 years now, and I'm currently working on the prerequisites for the PA program. As an experienced female in law enforcement, my humble advice is to be particularly mindful of how you dress. A correctional environment in any capacity, can be very challenging for females.

[d2305]

Not something you want to do if you can find another job.

[ChernePAC]

I worked in a state correctional system for over 5 years, doing everything from adolescent health to infirmary rounds. I started there as a new graduate and it had some pros and cons to it. Be forewarned that it is likely that any clinic you will work will be understaffed, so you may be one of the few providers there, and possibly not have a supervising physician on site (but available via phone). For me, the best part of the job was that I was running 2 clinics at 2 different facilites with minimal supervision, so after 6 months of hard work, sleepless nights, and looking at textbooks and the internet to make sure I wasn't mismanaging patients, I had improved practice and confidence in my skills.

 

Over those 5 years, I found myself being used and abused on a regular basis, as I had the work ethic to see most anything that came through the door. It was a great mix of general medicine along with a good dose of urgent care, and an occasional severe enough emergency that could be managed until they were shipped out by ambulance. The patients were mostly respectful, I never had any problems or felt unsafe. The nursing staff as well as other female PA/NP staff had very few instances of inappropriate behavior that I can recall.

 

I finally left after I started to realize how much I was being abused. I had a mountain of paperwork to do most every day (part of the fun of any government/medical job) and a full patient load. When my clinics seemed to be working well, I'd be sent to other state prisons to help out other clinics in need, typically working anywhere from 2-5 days at a clinic to attempt to catch them up, only to come back to my facility and be behind once more.

 

When one of the PAs I was working for left and they did not have anyone to replace him with, they used a per diem agency. After training 4-6 people who would leave anywhere after 1 shift to no more than 2 weeks, I realized that they had no intention of fully replacing the other person, just waiting to see if I would continue to keep the clinic running. I gave them 6 weeks notice, and they didnt' have adequate replacement strategy even then. I moved to another city and decided to take advantage of that high per diem wage, working in a similar manner as a per diem employee and getting paid better just once a week.

 

To this day, I saw things and was able to do thinigs that I cannot do in a family practice due to the nature of correctional medicine, where you are expected to save the state as much money as possible by doing several jobs and take care of things as much in-house as possible. It can be a wonderful learning experience, but you have to be pretty confident that you can work with minimal supervision. Overall a very hard, exhausting, and many times frustrating experience, but now working in family practice, the front desk love me because I won't worry about a last-minute addition to my schedule or having over 20 patients a day. I learned how to work very efficiently, when to refer and discuss the patients with other specialists without worry, and what I cold handle on my own, when to involve my supervision doc, and how to say no to patients in an appropriate yet respectful manner.