‘THIS SORT of service is the slippery slope towards the privatisation of the NHS,’ Dr Applebee, chair of Tower Hamlets Local Medical Committee warned yesterday, referring to the new private health company that boasts an ‘Uber’-style GP service.
Despite the ‘Uber’ model of business being exposed as promoting the worst type of precarious employment, the new private GP company has been launched. The ‘Doctaly’ service is now about to be rolled out across the whole of England.
There has already been ‘a successful’ pilot in two North London Care Commissioning Groups. The Doctaly service doesn’t employ GPs themselves. Instead the new service will match patients who are prepared to pay between £40 and £70 for an appointment, with family doctors prepared to work privately from their own practice in their ‘spare time’. This means that those who are prepared to pay are effectively queue-jumping patients who rely on their free NHS GP service.
Dr Jackie Applebee continued: ‘This is not the answer to the crisis in general practice. I acknowledge that access is a problem, but the fault for this lies at the door of the government who have disinvested in general practice for years so that we now have an unprecedented workforce crisis.
‘This introduces the principle of topping up NHS services with purchased services if one has the disposable income. If the more affluent begin to do this in significant numbers, it is only a small step to an insurance-based health service.’
Doctaly has been running for the past month at ten practices in Barnet and Enfield in North London with around 50 GPs signed up to offer appointments. BMA member Anna Athow commented: ‘An Uber service for booking a GP appointment on demand for cash, is the logical outcome of the huge government cuts to the NHS. The government has consciously created a national shortage of 8,000 GPs, with the worst deficiencies in the more deprived areas.
‘The Dictaly pilot was performed in Enfield, which has one of the worst GP-to-patient ratios in the country, despite all the promises of increased primary care after the closure of Chase Farm Hospital. It is on this fertile soil of crumbling NHS services, that the private company rears its ugly head. Dictaly says it is a hybrid between the NHS and existing private practice.
‘No; it’s a private company, crudely making profits out of patients’ desperation to see a doctor in a timely manner. It is bad medicine. The bedrock of British general practice was continuity of care based on the long-term doctor-patient relationship. A transient private consultation for cash with a doctor that doesn’t know you cannot compare. The doctor has no ongoing responsibility.
‘Does it harm the NHS?– of course it does. The government then claims that these patients are getting a service and uses it to justify even more cuts. It is urgent for the unions to get together and organise joint industrial action, to remove this privatising government which is destroying the NHS.’
