Organisation of prison medical services.

Much of the discussion about prison health care in the past few years has focused on whether the prison medical service* should be incorporated into the National Health Service. Some critics have tended to see this as an answer to all the ills of the service, and the prison department has taken the threat seriously enough to devote most of the part of its 1981 annual report dealing with health and medical services to reasons why it would not be a good idea.' In this article I outline how the medical services are organised and then consider what might be lost and what might be gained by reorganising the service so that it was either part of the NHS or at least responsible to the Department of Health and Social Security. Interestingly, in Scotland and Northern Ireland prison health services are already organised in a different way.