These additional perceived benefits go beyond a marginalized group gaining access to patient-centered end-of-life care and include potential inmate-caregiver rehabilitation, correctional medical staff feeling supported, and correctional facilities meeting end-of-life care mandates. The findings of the study suggest that inmate-caregivers believe they provide a unique and necessary adaptation to prison-based end-of-life care resulting in multilevel benefits. The overall goal of this research was to explore and describe a prison-based end-of-life care program that employs healthy inmates as peer-caregiver to chronically ill and/or dying inmates. The PCI research team interviewed twenty-two healthy inmates currently participating in an end-of-life peer-care program at a maximum security state level correctional facility. “Hospice is different for everyone… It is making a person as comfortable as you can, understanding that they are about to pass away.” ~ Inmate Caretaker The study resulted in the article published in Palliative Medicine “People don’t understand what goes on in here”: A consensual qualitative research analysis of inmate-caregiver perspectives on prison-based end-of-life care, February 12, 2018.

Luczkiewicz, M.D., Hospice Buffalo Physician, and community collaborator Jennifer Lodi-Smith, PhD., Canisius College Professor, worked together to explore an ongoing hospice prison-based end-of-life peer care program. “People don’t understand what goes on in here”: A consensual qualitative research analysis of inmate-caregiver perspectives on prison-based end-of-life care.Ĭheektowaga, NY – The Palliative Care Institute (PCI) research team (Rachel M.

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