GPs straight to your door (for £120 fee)

PATIENTS are being offered GP-to-your-door home visits for a £120 monthly fee.

The same- day services have been launched by two private firms who want to ‘revive the traditional family doctor’ and improve ‘convenience’.

Consultations last up to 45 minutes and patients can have up to 12 in a year before incurring extra fees.

The home visit schemes are being offered by AKEA Life in the NorthWest and GP Delivered Quick in London and Birmingham.

AKEA Life charges the under-40s £80 a month; £100 for 40 to 64-yearolds; or £140 per couple. The over65s pay £120, or £160 a couple.

The GPs – employed on a locum basis – visit between 8am and 10pm in the week and 9am to 5pm at weekends. Patients can have up to 12 consultations a year, but if they need more they pay an extra £75 per slot.

GP Delivered Quick is a pay-asyou-go service costing £120 for a 25minute weekday consultation or £150 at weekends. Patients book appointments by downloading an app on their smartphone and average waiting times are 90 minutes.

Both companies aim to expand services in the next two years.

GP surgeries in England are strug- gling to cope with the pressures of a rising and ageing population and a shortage of GPs. It can be very difficult to see a doctor out of hours.

But Dr Richard Vautrey, of the British Medical Association, said: ‘The BMA has expressed concern about services like this as patients are treated without full access to their GP practice clinical record, which makes prescribing and treatment more risky.

‘What’s really needed is significant investment in NHS GP services to ensure practices can develop their services to meet patient needs.’

Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: ‘Access to high quality GP services should not be dependent on a patient’s ability to pay.’

Lib Dem health spokesman Norman Lamb said: ‘Increasingly we will see people with money getting access to good and speedy healthcare and others left waiting.’

NHS head Simon Stevens has promised patients they will have weekend and evening appointments in two years’ time. But this is dependent on the Health Service recruiting an extra 5,000 GPs when it is losing an average of 150 a month.