Prisoners in Bakýrköy Prison cannot receive treatment because only one doctor is employed to care for sick prisoners.
The lack of healthcare providers in the prison, which hosts 1,300 people, makes sick prisoners wait for weeks or even months to visit the prison clinic. In the face of this regularized situation, political prisoners filed a criminal complaint against the administration and urged the Minister of Justice to take action.
The everlasting clinic problem in Bakýrköy L Type Prison leads to reactions from sick prisoners who face critical consequences for not being provided with required medical staff. One doctor, one nurse and several health officers work in the prison whose population is increasing more and more every passing day. The prison also lacks health workers to remain on duty at night in case of emergency.
Fifty year-old ordinary prisoner Þengül Küçükgüler, who suffers from asthma, lung disease and hypertension, was able to visit the prison clinic only five times along his imprisonment for 26 months.
Nobody will hear us if we happen to die, says Küçükgüler and remarks that his demand to go to the clinic was many times not taken seriously despite numerous asthma exacerbations he suffered.
A woman prisoner died of heart attack last year because of this deprivation, says another ordinary prisoner Meryem Göçer whose right foot became disabled following an infantile paralysis she had. Göçer says that she has received no answer from the administration in reply to thirty petitions she has submitted so far.
PJAK prisoner Aysel Biler who deals with the problems of sick prisoners in B.6 ward underlines that it can no more go on like this and adds the followings; We strive hard for weeks to take an emergency patient to the prisons clinic. They refuse our demand, by either stalling us or telling us that the doctor isnt there. Sick prisoners are aggrieved while waiting for long hours till the end of the shift without receiving treatment.
Remarking that prisoners made a denunciation to the Ministry of Justice on April 16, Biler says they demand the increase of the number of medical staff in the soonest time, acceleration of clinic procedures and a scene investigation by an expert delegation to supervise the adequateness of health services in the prison.
* Zeynep Kuray has been arrested with dozens of journalists in December 2011. She is currently held in Bakýrköy L Type Prison