- The National Health Service has announced that it would start trialing a mobile application that would allow patients across the UK to book appointments with their General Practitioners.
- It will be the first U.K. GP appointment booking app to connect people to their doctor directly from their smartphone, as well as let them order repeat prescriptions, register as an organ donor and get advice from the 111 service.
The National Health Service has announced that it would start trialing a mobile application that would allow patients across the UK to book appointments with their General Practitioners. It will be the first U.K. GP appointment booking app to connect people to their doctor directly from their smartphone, as well as let them order repeat prescriptions, register as an organ donor and get advice from the 111 service.
The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, commented that this app will mark the “death knell” of the early morning scramble to secure a GP appointment, putting patients “back in the driving seat” of their healthcare.
But will a mobile app really be able to revolutionize access to GPs, or is it another way of putting more responsibility back onto patients and away from the NHS?
Halima Khan, Executive Director of Nesta’s Health Lab believes that while adoption of technology is helpful, it doesn’t necessarily solve problems: “So, much about this app is welcome, but it is unclear how it will incorporate triage and avoid appointments being booked unnecessarily – such as for issues that a pharmacist could resolve.
“Arguably, triage in primary care needs to be strengthened not weakened, so this app should be designed and implemented with this in mind. There are also those who do not have access to digital technology who may be disadvantaged when trying to book an appointment.”
Ben Teichman, CEO and Co-Founder of Doctaly.com, agrees that while apps do ease the 8am scramble in some respects, it won’t be a magic solution: “Providing patients with an online booking facility will definitely help to ease the frustration of the GP appointment booking process, however this, unfortunately, won’t mean that more appointments are available to be booked. The key here is capacity, in addition to ensuring that the right processes are in place to manage that capacity as efficiently as possible.”
It could also be argued that a lot of these services are already available for patients in the U.K. For example, Boots Pharmacy already works with local GPs to order repeat prescriptions, letting people know via SMS when medication is ready to be picked up. Also, Babylon Health, which is behind GP at Hand being trialed in London, allows patients to access a GP around the clock, wherever they are, and the Evergreen Life apps already offer NHS-assured access to GP online services including appointment booking, ordering repeat prescriptions and viewing medical records.
Evergreen also believes it has already helped with the morning appointment scramble: “By providing 24-hour access to GP appointments, we’ve seen the rush at 8am reduced,” said Stephen Critchlow, CEO and founder of Evergreen Life. “After scaling our approach to nearly half a million users, we’ve discovered that we also had to change the way GP practices work to reduce demand and improve efficiency – otherwise a practice cannot respond to demand from patients. We’re therefore working with practices to change the way they work by being digitally enabled.”
Self-diagnosis has also been in the headlines over the past couple of years. Around 21% of patients opted to search for their symptoms online rather than wait to see a doctor as they were unable to get appointments at short-notice (UK Digital Health Report, 2015).
So, is the real crisis with the GPs and the NHS, rather than accessibility to making appointments?
Teichman believes so: “As the funding required to create a sustainable solution to the GP crisis isn’t available in the NHS budget, we should keep an open mind with regards to looking to the private sector to offer ways to ease the burden. This plays a crucial part in increasing overall appointment capacity – if doctors are willing to do extra work and a proportion of patients are willing to pay for affordable GP access, we have a solution that runs alongside the NHS and eases the growing burden on NHS primary care.
“The biggest risk to patients today is that GPs continue to leave the NHS altogether due to burn out, diminishing pay and political indifference. The only solution to the current GP crisis is to create more appointment capacity to address growing patient demand. Since the Department of Health set a target to recruit another 5000 GPs by 2020, we have lost over a thousand, so its plan is clearly not working as expected. Rather than bringing in doctors from abroad, we should be focusing on ways to increase capacity from the 40,000 GPs currently in the UK, 50% of whom work part-time.”
Date: July 5, 2018
Source: Forbes