NHS has not found ‘balance’ for online and in-person care

VIRTUAL GP appointments are a form of “digital exclusion” and the NHS has not yet found the “right balance” of online and in person after Covid, senior health officials have admitted.

Before the pandemic, about 80 per cent of GP appointments were face-toface, but this now sits at fewer than two out of three and has plateaued despite calls for more in-person meetings.

Experts and patients are increasingly frustrated at the insistence on using digital mediums for diagnoses and check-ups, but health bosses and doctors say it improves efficiency and allows for more patients to be seen.

But at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Dr Shera Chok, deputy chief medical officer at NHS Digital and a GP in Tower Hamlets, London, said: “We’re trying to find our way back to the right balance. I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Jenny Chong, a non-executive director on the board of Medway NHS Foundation in Kent, said from the NHS’S perspective, “really great innovation” was accelerated by Covid.

She said: “I do understand face-toface, we lose that kind of context and that this is digital exclusion, but at least [for] a lot of other patients we can give them the appointments faster, quicker.”

Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph revealed a 92-year-old former district nurse was advised to begin end-of-life care after a GP wrongly diagnosed her with organ failure via video call.

Official data show 63 per cent of consultations were done in person in England in April, up just one percentage point in a month.

Prof Martin Marshall, chairman of the Royal College of GPS, said: “In-person consulting is and will remain core to general practice, and the majority of consultations are being delivered in this way – but good, safe and appropriate care can also be delivered remotely, and we know many patients find this way of accessing care convenient and effective.”

An NHS spokesman said: “Every GP practice must provide face-to-face as well as telephone and online appointments as part of making primary care as accessible as possible for different patients, depending on the care they need.

“The latest figures show in April over 25 million GP appointments were delivered and 15 million of them, around two thirds, were in person, up two million on the same month last year.”