The Oregon Department of Corrections has significantly overhauled the longstanding and notoriously powerful panels that decide whether prisoners get off-site specialty medical care, the agency’s chief medical officer said Thursday.
Dr. Michael Seale oversees the delivery of medical care to Oregon’s roughly 12,000 prisoners. He took over from the previous director, Dr. Warren Roberts, who was fired late last year after an outside review questioned his leadership, decision-making and supervision of the prison system’s more than 600 medical staffers.
Seale previously worked as the medical director for the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office and before that spent more than two decades working in correctional health care in Texas…