Officials offer incentive for Kansas inmates to receive a flu vaccine
Kansas prison commissaries will get a tax-funded boost after the Kansas Department of Corrections offered a $5 incentive for inmates to get a flu shot.
The money can be used for snacks, phone calls or “any allowable use you decide,” the KDOC said in an October email to inmates. In the past, without an incentive, fewer than half of the inmates opted for the shot, according to KDOC spokesperson Carol Pitts.
Now, roughly 63% of inmates who have been offered a vaccine have taken it, she said. That equates to about 3,500 inmates who have received a shot at a total cost of roughly $17,500. The money will come from federal dollars through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act.
The incentive is to reduce the “potential impact of the upcoming flu season, particularly in the wake of a pandemic,” Pitts said in an email. “We have not done any other incentives for medications or vaccinations.”
The flu season peaks between December and February, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “but activity can last as late as May.”
The KDOC had 323 inmates report flu-like symptoms last year and 175 inmates in 2018.
The KDOC has “no cases reported” as of Wednesday.
The effectiveness of the ongoing incentive has varied by facility. Participation has ranged from a low of 49% at one facility to a high of 90% at another, Pitts said.
KDOC employees also have a flu-shot incentive. Instead of money, employees could earn a credit that will help them their insurance premiums.
“Incentivizing good preventative health care is standard practice used by many private health care plans,” Pitts said.
Health officials say a person can be infected with the flu and COVID-19 at the same time — no COVID-19 vaccine is currently available to the public. And prisons seem more susceptible to an outbreak.
COVID-19 in prisons
More than 4,900 inmates have been infected with COVID-19, according to the KDOC. The prison population in Kansas changes daily but hovers around 8,400 inmates.
Nearly 800 staff have also been infected.
The KDOC has reported 14 COVID-19 deaths: three staff members and 11 inmates.
U.S. prison inmates are 5.5 times more likely to test positive and three times more likely to die of COVID-19 than someone not behind bars, according to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The deaths were calculated after adjusting for age and sex differences between the two groups.
This story was originally published December 4, 2020 at 4:51 AM.