21 Mar 2012

The ASI in the service of women’s health. For a whole week this was the objective of TELESAL, the Italian Space Agency telemedicine project, which took place at the women’s prison in Pozzuoli from 22 March. The “Women Inside” event was promoted by Giuseppina Tommasielli, who is responsible for equal opportunities in Naples city council, along with the collaboration of TELESAL, the Policlinico Federico II in Naples and the Naples 2 North health authority. The event consisted of a week of prevention services for inmates and operators’ health.

The mobile TELESAL unit, with its high definition equipment for mammographic screening, undertakes examinations and gives tests results in real time and, if necessary, allows subjects to be taken care of by the specialist staff of the Naples 2 North health authority. By this initiative TELESAL demonstrated that its innovative technology can answer to critical state and healthcare emergencies in prison thus ensuring detainees’ wellbeing, both physical and psychological.

TELESAL is the ambitious distance medical assistance programme based on satellite technologies developed by the ASI with the Ministry of Health and a group of Italian companies, universities, research institutes and public bodies. The project went into the prison with its equipment, in this case placing itself at the service of the women inside, but it also intended to demonstrate that such an initiative can be useful as a model for creating, in the near future, a 360 degree surgery of general and specialist medicine, that crosses the prison’s threshold and, at the same time, offers healthcare at a relatively low cost.

Furthermore, this event, in the light of the obtained results, represents a good support for institutions, that can redesign healthcare problems in the current prison context.

• »TELESAL Web page