Rikers detainees missed over a third of medical appointments last year, BOC says
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Over one third of all scheduled medical appointments were missed by Rikers Island detainees in 2023, a new report from the Board of Correction found. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
Over one-third of all detainees on Rikers Island who requested a trip to the doctor last year were never taken to their scheduled appointment, a new report from the Department of Correction’s watchdog says.
In 2023, officers with the Department of Correction failed over 35,200 times to get detainees to their medical appointments scheduled with Correctional Health Services, the agency that provides medical care on Rikers, according to a recent report from the Board of Correction, the civilian watchdog board charged with monitoring the DOC.
The number of missed appointments accounts for just under 37 percent of all medical appointment requests made by people in custody in 2023.
And it’s possible an even higher amount of appointments went unfulfilled, the BOC found.
Around 13 percent of all medical requests did not have a documented outcome, according to the report, either “because the calls were addressed administratively by CHS nursing on the phone or because encounter outcomes for scheduled appointments were not documented by clinical staff.”
Even when detainees were taken to the clinic by the DOC in 2023, the agency still managed to violate the required minimum standards for care created, maintained and enforced by the BOC.
According to the BOC, of all the sick call requests that resulted in a person in custody being escorted to the clinic, less than half were taken within the required timeframe of one business day.
The DOC has, in the past, claimed that a majority of missed appointments come after detainees formally refuse to be taken to the clinic, however, that assertion has been largely disputed in court by attorneys who work with incarcerated individuals and by detainees themselves who have said in sworn affidavits that the DOC’s records don’t match their experience.
In its report, the BOC said that driving the high rate of missed appointments were a number of factors, including officer staffing shortages and poor communication between the DOC and CHS, a branch of the city’s Health + Hospitals system.
The current system for providing medical care to detainees came about in 2015, when CHS was created to replace Corizon Inc., a private healthcare company that previously provided medical care on Rikers.
Since its inception, CHS’ communication with the DOC has had issues, as acknowledged by both agencies numerous times over the past nine years.
But good communication between CHS and DOC is necessary. CHS needs to schedule medical appointments at times that don’t conflict with programming a detainee may be participating in, and DOC needs to be able to coordinate its staffing to ensure that officers are available to take detainees to their appointment.
The report claims that driving some of the miscommunication is the relatively recent introduction of CHS’ Health Triage Line, which detainees call when they want to schedule a non-emergency medical appointment.
Though it is the method most utilized by detainees hoping to set up an appointment, it’s also the method that most infrequently results in a detainee arriving at the clinic, according to the report.
The BOC said that the DOC should no longer rely on the call-in system, and create its own method for scheduling appointments for detainees.
In response, CHS said the BOC’s analysis of its Health Triage Line was “flawed.”
“Unfortunately, the report fails to recognize that CHS’ Health Triage Line is separate and distinct from DOC’s sick call process, which the report purports to analyze,” CHS said. “This fundamental misunderstanding informs the report’s flawed methodology and conclusion.”
The report also recommended the BOC “should aim to improve the provision and timeliness of sick call to at least 95 percent within the next six months” and that it should “evaluate PIC satisfaction with sick call services” by distributing a survey.
Like CHS, the BOC also disputed the findings of the report.
“After a careful review, the department has serious concerns about the underlying data interpretation and analysis, and subsequent conclusions represented in the report,” the agency said.
As it's done in the past, the agency pointed its fingers at detainees and said the report “does not appear to take into account the role of people in custody within the clinic production process.”
“People in custody can decline to attend a scheduled clinic encounter at any point in the production process, which may result in a non-production or a delay in production,” they added.
The report is only the latest document outlining the significant troubles detainees face in seeing a doctor or nurse on Rikers Island, the jail complex where over three dozen people have died in the past three years.
The DOC was found to be in contempt of court in 2022 after a judge said that they had failed to get thousands of detainees to their appointments, in defiance of a court order mandating incarcerated individuals receive medical care when they request it. Attorneys with the Legal Aid Society, who were behind the 2022 contempt claim, again asked a judge this year to find the agency in contempt of the same court order claiming that medical care on Rikers has only worsened in the two years since their first legal action.
The DOC is also facing a number of wrongful death lawsuits that claim that in the leadup to several detainees’ deaths, correctional officers failed to get the detainees to their appointments, potentially contributing to their demise.
The BOC, which also runs investigations into detainee deaths, has found that detainees frequently miss medical appointments prior to their deaths.
The BOC’s recent report comes around two months after the death of Charizma Jones, who died in a hospital on July 14 after an infection she may have contracted on Rikers Island put her into a coma.
According to Jones’ attorneys with the Legal Aid Society, the 23-year-old “was repeatedly denied initial care by DOC staff” after experiencing a medical emergency.
Over two days in May, medical workers with CHS allegedly attempted to check on her, but correction officers reportedly barred them from entering her cell.
Jones subsequently fell into a coma and later died at a hospital outside of the city’s custody.
The Legal Aid Society described her death in a recent court filing as "an egregious denial of access to medical care."
