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Summary

This report sets out the Parliamentary Ombud’s findings regarding healthcare services in fifteen prisons during the period 2023–2025. Our investigations reveal repeated and serious deficiencies in the healthcare provided to prisoners. These include failures to assess prisoners’ healthcare needs, delays and interruptions in treatment, inadequate accessibility, and a lack of opportunities to communicate confidentially with healthcare services. One of the serious findings is that many prisons do not systematically assess and monitor suicide risk, and they lack adequate systems for implementing evidencebased suicide prevention measures. There is insufficient attention to, and little systematic work on, known vulnerabilities among prisoners.

Prisoners held in isolation do not always receive daily supervision from healthcare personnel. This is a critical finding. Most recently, in 2025, the Parliamentary Ombud alerted the Storting in a special report1 that the use of lock- up and de facto isolation in Norwegian prisons entails a risk of violating the prohibition in human rights law against inhuman or degrading treatment. In many cases, healthcare services are unaware of the extent of lock-up in prisons, hich weakens their ability to follow up conditions that may contribute to isolation-related harm.

In nearly all the prisons, there were clear deficiencies in healthcare personnel’s supervision of prisoners held in isolation. In several prisons healthcare services lacked knowledge about the health-related consequences of isolation. We are particularly concerned about the lack of supervision of prisoners placed in security cells. Placement in a security cell is the form of isolation most harmful to health. In addition, the use of force during placement in a security cell may result in injuries going undetected when prisoners are not supervised by healthcare personnel. Another serious finding was that healthcare services in several prisons did not provide daily medical supervision of prisoners who had been remanded in custody in isolation.

Combined, these findings imply that important information about prisoners’ health is not identified. This creates a risk that prisoners do not receive the healthcare they are entitled and that their health deteriorates. The Parliamentary Ombud considers that these findings may constitute violations of prisoners’ rights to life and health. Prisoners’ healthcare needs differ from those of the general population. Higher levels of illness among prisoners, limited autonomy, and isolation place a particular responsibility on the state and impose highly specific requirements on prison healthcare services. The findings described in this report are linked to three overarching challenges: 1) insufficient knowledge about prisoners’ health problems and prison conditions, and what these mean for healthcare services; 2) healthcare services are not staffed adequately to protect prisoners’ healthcare rights; and 3) insufficient cooperation between the Correctional Service and the primary and specialist healthcare services.