NHS IN CRISIS CAN AN APP REPLACE YOUR GP?

It’s enough to make you sick

Jeremy Hunt has a new plan to ease the pressure on the NHS. In early September the Health Secretary unveiled proposals to overhaul the 111 service that will see patients checking their symptoms online so they can determine whether they need to speak to a health professional. Critics say that this “self-diagnosis” is an unsatisfactory replacement for a visit to a GP.

The scheme is part of a Government push to encourage patients to use the internet more when contacting the NHS. At the heart is a new website, due to launch as a trial next April, that will aim to provide ‘one stop’ access to the NHS. It will let people register with a GP, order prescriptions, make appointments and even download their own medical records. Patients will also be able to see league tables that rank the performance of their local health services.

Aside from some unease about patient confidentiality, the need for a new website is widely accepted among health professionals. But they are more concerned on the issue of asking patients to check their own symptoms. Dr Maureen Baker, of the Royal College of GPS, called for the Government to proceed with “extreme caution”. She warns that it’s unrealistic to expect sick people to accurately describe their symptoms online. It’s much better, she said, for the public to talk to a worker trained in asking the right questions.

The Government insists that the service will be used only for “less serious” problems, and that it will never replace a doctor or nurse who needs to make a “clinical judgement” about what treatment people require.

But some patient campaign groups are worried. Phil Booth from medconfidential ( https://medconfidential.org) said that because people express themselves differently when texting than they do when talking to others face to face, they may underestimate their symptoms. “There is a huge amount of training that goes into a doctor interpreting what someone says – even over the phone”, he added.

With NHS services under unprecedented strain, the Government argues that it needs a more efficient way to deal with minor ailments. But Dr Baker says that it’s wrong to assume that moving a service online will save money: “NHS 111 centres – online or telephone – will still need to be staffed appropriately to meet demand, and have sufficient numbers of healthcare professionals who are trained to deal with serious - and not so serious - medical conditions”. Some of this training will come from

a £10m fund handed by the Government to 12 NHS trusts.

Another problem Dr Baker foresees is “alienating” patients who are intimidated by technology. But Hunt claims that in the “age of the smartphone” people want a more convenient method of checking their symptoms, adding that the new system would become a “trusted and approved” alternative to searching on Google. However it seems we’re reluctant to talk to doctors online. Figures from the NHS in 2014 showed that only two per cent of people had used the service’s online tools.

For the public to feel confident using the new service it would need to deliver better diagnoses than the old NHS Choices Symptom Checker, which missed one in eight emergencies, according to a Harvard Medical School study published last year. Until that trust has been earned, many people will still prefer the friendly reassurance of a visit to their GP.