Tunstall press releases back from a two month break. Like the press releases that claimed that Nottingham, Walsall and Hull are mainstreaming telehealth using Tunstall equipment, they still don’t tell us how they define ‘mainstreaming’. Is that every single patient in the area who meets certain criteria? A couple of thousand? A couple of hundred? Thirty?
I did the Swindon PCT search for you. It’s not very revealing, either. The PCT Board paper dated October 2006, which apparently kicked off the project, mentions a quarter of a million pounds to be spent on implementing telehealth monitoring for 56 users for a 6 month project. (Yes, that’s £4,464 per person.) The Telehealth page, updated 20 August 2008 doesn’t mention numbers but says that “Telehealth became active across the borough on Tuesday 3rd July 2007” So what’s changed to make the project newsworthy now?