Victor Patterson qualified as a doctor from the University of Cambridge and Westminster Medical School 1972. He trained as a neurologist in Stoke-on Trent, Belfast and St Louis before being appointed as a consultant neurologist in Northern Ireland based at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast but covering two small rural hospitals. Optimising outreach neurology was one of his main interests throughout his professional career and he finally cracked in in the 2000s by using telemedicine, eventually doing about 75% of his clinical consultations from home by email or videolink. This network was awarded the prize for The World's Best Telemedicine Network by the SFT in Brisbane in 2002 and he has co-edited two books on telemedicine as well as publishing many papers. He was appointed an Honorary Professor of Neurology by Queen's University, Belfast in 2008. He retired from the NHS in 2008 with a mission to improve neurology services by telemedicine in the UK (so far largely unfulfilled) and also develop services for epilepsy patients in the developing world. He is an Honorary Consulting Neurologist for two global telemedicine networks - Swinfen Telemedicine and Medecins sans Frontieres.