New Health Secretary pays £25 to see GP over the internet
THE new Health Secretary uses a controversial smartphone app that offers virtual consultations with a GP.
Matt Hancock downloaded the Babylon Health app two months ago. It provides a ten-minute video appointment for £25 and avoids the need for face-to-face consultations.
At an event in Central London last month, Mr Hancock said: ‘ I’ve signed up for Babylon Health so I no longer have a physical GP.
‘My GP is through the NHS on Babylon Health – it’s brilliant.’
But GP leaders are very concerned about virtual consultations and fear they will miss serious, less obvious symptoms that doctors pick up through their gut instincts.
They are also worried the app will undermine the doctor-patient relationship because patients are consulted by strangers they have never met who do not have access to their notes. Mr Hancock’s support for the Babylon Health app may put him on a collision course with the British Medical Association and the Royal College of GPs.
Last November, Babylon Health took over an NHS GP practice in Fulham, West London, and offered patients free virtual consultations on their smartphones as well as faceto-face appointment. The firm has encouraged patients in the area to de-register with their own surgery and join the new practice and 20,000 patients signed up in the first six months.
But the BMA and the RCGP have accused Babylon of ‘cherry-picking’ the younger, easy- to- treat patients and leaving surgeries with the older, more complex patients.
Surgeries – including the one run by Babylon – are paid an average of £150 by the NHS for every patient on their books, so practices whose patients are moving to Babylon stand to lose substantial amounts of money. Last night it emerged that former culture secretary Mr Hancock, who was made Health Secretary in Monday’s mini- reshuffle, received a £5,000 in March 2015 from a donor who is the director of a number of companies working in the health sector. According to Companies House, Gurdev Dadral is director of several firms providing agency nurses and healthcare staff.
Mr Hancock, 39, the MP for West Suffolk, who has three young children with his wife Martha, an osteopath, has inherited the hugely contentious social care remit from Jeremy Hunt and is supposed to be publishing a social care green paper this autumn.
In a speech in 2012 he backed introducing an insurance system to fund social care. This would allow adults to take out insurance against the possibility of needing to spend many years being looked after in old age, if they develop dementia, for example.
‘Cherry-picking younger patients’