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Across the UK, there is little doubt that the provision of healthcare in prisons has changed significantly over the last 30 years. The 1996 report by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, ‘Patient or Prisoner?’ highlighted several concerns about the provision of healthcare in prisons, notably regarding equity, standards, professional isolation and whether the Prison Service had the capacity to carry out its healthcare function adequately.1 It recommended that the responsibility of providing healthcare to prisoners should be transferred from the Prison Service to the National Health Service (NHS), as a means of improving healthcare within prisons. Ten years later, in 2006, responsibility for the commissioning of health services finally became the responsibility of the NHS.2 Another decade on, a rapid review of the changes concluded that ‘prison healthcare services have undergone “transformation” during the ten-year time period of NHS commissioning of prison healthcare since 2006, leading to significant improvements in quality of care’.3