Barbara Moreland
Health
Care behind the walls
By Terry Jorden
 Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre Health Care Manager Barbara Moreland. |
Throughout Barbara Moreland’s 28-year-long nursing career, she has seen and done a lot.
She has been a neonatal intensive care nurse. She has worked for a family doctor. She was one of the first to obtain her nurse practitioner certification. She has even nursed in rural Manitoba.
But nothing prepared her more for her current practice at a correctional centre than her time in several remote northern nursing stations.
The early part of her nursing career was spent in Pukatawagan in northern Manitoba and Aklavik near the mouth of the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories.
In both cases, the communities were small and made up of mostly First Nations people. The nearest hospital was a plane ride away. A doctor visited once a week. The registered nurse was expected to provide an expanded range of nursing services, mostly by herself.
Since 1985, she has held the position of Health Care Manager at the Edmonton Remand Centre and more recently at the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre.
“My current job is very similar to a northern nursing station except we don’t deliver babies and the doctor visits more regularly,” she said.
While she and her staff of six full-time registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses and several casual nurses may not assist in the delivery of babies, they do provide pre-natal examinations and just about anything else that comes along.
In a typical month, the department will see over 1,000 offenders with health issues such as diabetes, epilepsy, cardiac problems, cancer, a wide range of infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis and TB, and injuries from workplace accidents. The nursing staff also provide public health education on birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, proper diet, the effects of drugs, alcohol and smoking and even hygiene and parenting skills.
Besides the nurses who staff the facility between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. daily, other full-time and part-time health professionals include a clinical psychologist, a psychiatrist, a dentist, a physiotherapist, an infectious disease specialist and a doctor who visits twice a week.
Working in a correctional centre carries with it more security issues than in other settings. For example, offenders are not left alone in the clinic. Medication is locked up and scissors or syringes are never left lying around.
“We actually are safer here than a nurse who works in the ER at some … major acute care hospital,” said Moreland, who is not aware of any nurse who has been physically assaulted. If there is a problem, a corrections officer is literally seconds away.
One
of the good parts of her job is seeing the often-dramatic improvements
in the health of offenders while they are incarcerated. For some, time
spent behind bars means three meals a day, a warm place to sleep, regular
physical activity, no drugs or alcohol, dental care and proper medication.
The frustrating
part is watching many offenders return to the system looking worse each
time.
Fort
Saskatchewan Correctional Centre Health Care Manager
Barbara Moreland
“Every day is very different,” Moreland said. “We enjoy a high degree of autonomy and independence. This type of practice setting is not for everyone but for those who enjoy it, the experience is interesting and satisfying.”
