The troubled Metropolitan Detention Center jail in Brooklyn has just two doctors on staff to care for its more than 1,100 inmates, and an opening for a third physician has gone unfilled for nearly a decade.
That detail about the city’s only federal jail — which has long been plagued by delays in medical treatment, missed medical appointments, and botched cancer diagnoses — came out in a Brooklyn Federal Court hearing last week about why an inmate didn’t get all his antibiotics while in solitary, shedding more light on the horrific conditions at MDC that include a string of violent incidents and instances of medical mistreatment .
At the hearing Monday, MDC’s clinical director Dr. Bruce Bialor said he oversees a staff of about 20 or 30 inside the Sunset Park facility, and he couldn’t tell the judge running the hearing whether the federal Bureau of Prisons maintained a specific medical-staff-to-inmate ratio…