Introduction:

The prison population, due to its vulnerable condition, is exposed to deteriorating health. The state is the one who must provide and guarantee basic services. The objective was to describe the conditions of access to oral health for inmates confined in penitentiary centers in Peru.

Material and methods:

It is a descriptive, longitudinal study and it collected the data in a documentary file from secondary sources between 2015 to 2021 provided by the Peru's National Penitentiary Institute. The sample consisted of 87,245 inmates confined in 64 establishments and distributed in eight regions. For data collection and statistical analysis, the professional statistical software package IBM SPSS Statistics version 26 for Windows (SPSS Inc., United States) was used. The data analysis is descriptive, it was carried out using frequency tables, in which we worked with the absolute and relative frequencies.

Results:

The results show that only 43 inmates (67.19%) have dental services, of which 29 are assigned a dental staff.

Discussion:

Regarding prevention measures, none of the prisons allocate a budget for this purpose. During the year 2021, 22,364 inmates did not receive oral care. A large part of the prison population does not have access to basic dental services and cons receive precarious services. The oral health of inmates is put at risk and they are deprived of their basic rights to access to health.

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