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Could technology be used to improve emergency healthcare in prisons?

In the fourth episode of the QUT Global Law, Science and Technology Seminar Series for 2023, co-hosted by the Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Professor Anne-Maree Kelly will discuss the deficiencies in health care provision in Australian prisons, and explore how technology could address some of these deficiencies.

Abstract

Like everyone else in the community, prisoners can develop life-threatening illness. Unlike others, they cannot freely access emergency health services and rely completely on the prison authority to meet their emergency health needs. The tragic death in custody of Veronica Nelson in Victoria made big news earlier this year. It is however just one example of potentially preventable deaths in Australian prisons due to deficiencies in health care provision that have repeatedly been identified by coroners and royal commissions. The deficiencies are operational, clinical and stigmatic and not limited to a single prison or jurisdiction. This seminar will review the legal and regulatory obligations and explore what a search of coronial cases for deaths related to the provision of emergency healthcare in prisons in the past 10 years in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland can tell us above deficiencies in acute healthcare in prisons. It will then explore how technology – some of it already available – could address some of these issues.

Event details

Date: 24 August, 2023
Time: 11am to 12:30pm AEST
Location: online via Zoom
Cost: Free

Guest presenter

Professor Anne-Maree KellyProfessor Anne-Maree Kelly is a senior emergency physician and research academic at Western Health, The University of Melbourne. She is also an adjunct professor at the Australian Centre for Health Law Research at Queensland University of Technology and an experienced provider of expert evidence to coroners, AHPRA and civil litigation in most Australian jurisdictions. She has more than 300 peer reviewed publications (in medicine) as well as having edited a textbook and contributed more than 30 book chapters. Professor Kelly’s interest in patient safety and clinical decision-making in ED led her to the interface between law and medicine. Her research interests similarly broadened to include that interface, especially for vulnerable populations such as those to whom Mental Health acts are applied and prisoners.

About the series

The QUT Global Law, Science and Technology Seminar Series aims to bring together national and international speakers who will explore the personal, societal and governance dimensions of solving real world problems which are influenced by, and through the interactions of science, technology and the law.

The series will host speakers who think about ‘technology’ and ‘science’ as broadly construed to refer to methods of framing or interacting with the world, and that enable the critical and imaginative questioning of the technical, science, environmental and health dimensions of law and life.

Previous Seminars

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