Benjamin Franklin once famously quipped “nothing is certain but death and taxes.” However, Franklin did not work in a jail, otherwise he would have said: “Nothing is certain except death, taxes and grievances.”

On the outside, patients do not write grievances—they vote with their feet. If they dislike the medical care they are receiving, they will just go to a different doctor. In a jail, they cannot do this. We have a grievance system in Correctional Medicine because our patients cannot fire us (and we cannot fire them–discussed previously here). If jail patients are unhappy with their medical care, their only recourse is to write a grievance.

Grievances are not necessarily bad things. A medical grievance is sometimes the way by which jail patients alert us to significant problems that we may have not known about or mistakes that we made. I myself have had my butt saved in this manner—more than once! Many grievances are simply about communication errors. We have not yet adequately explained a medical decision to the patient.

Yet jail medical personnel often have a bad attitude about grievances. This is unfortunate, because medical grievances are an important—even essential—part of the jail medical system. I believe that the most important reason for the bad attitude is that people have not been taught how to write a proper grievance response. That, then is the topic of today’s JailMedicine post. Continue reading →