The Alaska Department of Corrections has a new chief medical officer: Dr. Timothy Ballard.
The department announced Ballard’s hiring this week. Ballard is a physician and a retired Air Force colonel who has a master’s degree in environmental health. Before this, he was the chief medical officer of Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage for three years.
Alaska’s corrections department is the largest health care facility and behavioral health care provider in the state. The practitioners often treat people who don’t or can’t access health care and mental health care outside incarceration.
The department’s former chief medical officer, Dr. Robert Lawrence, left the job in May to take the same position for the state, replacing Dr. Anne Zink.
While Lawrence was chief medical officer for corrections, the department faced scrutiny for high suicide rates and lawsuits for wrongful deaths of prisoners. But he said he worked to reduce deaths while there.
The new chief medical officer, Ballard, will head a complex system of care in the state’s 15 jails, prisons and pretrial facilities. So far this year, 12 prisoners have died in the state’s care. Corrections officials say they’re also working to adapt to the fentanyl epidemic by treating addiction and reversing overdoses with Narcan in their facilities.
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Rachel Cassandra covers health and wellness for Alaska Public Media. Reach her atrcassandra@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Rachel here.
