Introducing telehealth to English prisons

North American and Australasian Correctional Departments have not only been quick to see the advantages of using modern telecommunications technology to facilitate health consultation between patients in custody and clinicians in the community, but they have lost no time in its wide-scale implementation. Here, Belmarsh High Secure Prison and Greenwich Hospital NHS Trust have piloted telehealth, but not taken it beyond the experimental stage. What exactly is telehealth? Sometimes referred to as telemedicine, it is the delivery in real time of health-related treatment, triage, diagnosis, services, information and clinical supervision (patients and clinicians, individually and in groups) using telecommunication technology.