Meeting government objectives for telecare in moving from local implementation to mainstream services.

The UK government wishes to deploy a mainstream telecare service by 2010. We believe that it will be necessary to overcome the organizational and structural barriers to such an implementation. A better understanding of the effect of telecare across the care system as a whole will also be needed. In the absence of rigorous data from trials and because of the time taken for systemic effects to emerge, the evidence for the benefits of telecare needs to be explored through simulation modelling.