THE ROBODOC will see you now

( He’s very efficient... shame about the bedside manner! )

PATIENTS who visit their local medical surgery will soon be seen by an electronic ‘doctor’.

In an attempt to save GPs’ valuable time, hi-tech ‘pods’ will be installed in surgeries.

The gadgets will allow patients to measure their own vital signs including blood pressure, BMI and heart rate. Patients will carry out tests – and fill in computerised questionnaires regarding their smoking, alcohol and contraception status – in GP waiting rooms before an actual appointment with their doctor. The results will then be uploaded to a patient’s records and become available for viewing on the GP’s computer screen.

This ‘self-service’ system is designed to save doctors time so they can avoid carrying out routine tests and instead focus on more complex issues and treating patients.

So far 30 surgery pods have been installed on a trial basis across seven of Scotland’s 14 health boards.

Now the scheme is being rolled out at more surgeries – last week NHS Lanarkshire advertised for six of the machines, stating they would ‘allow more efficient use of clinical time’.

Last night medical experts said the pods were the future and patients should expect an increase in such technology.

Dr Alan McDevitt, chairman of the Scottish GP committee of the British Medical Association, said: ‘The future will inevitably be about personal monitoring and measurement taking – it is all about healthcare moving forward and patients being able to do things themselves without the GP’s or nurse’s help.

‘Things like blood sugar and blood pressure can already be taken at home and sent in to surgeries – we are quickly seeing a move towards this sort of thing.’

Some experts have praised the new technology and believe it will save GPs time, whilst allowing patients to

‘The future will be about personal monitoring’

take control of their own healthcare.

Dr Mike Smith, a trustee at the Patients Association, said: ‘I am certain the pressures on the NHS can no longer be resolved by trying to rely on the individual having to see a GP as the entrée to the system.

‘So using technology as an alternative – so long as people still have access to a professional – is a very good and promising idea.’

However, Dr Miles Mack, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said: ‘This development may create a higher concentration of appointments where doctors solely focus on difficult and complex patient issues, instead of some which involve taking simple measurements. This could very well result in doctors becoming more stressed and ultimately burned out.

‘Moreover, the personal and social contact that is embedded in our healthcare system will be lost.

‘We are in a world where healthcare is so much more than blood sugar levels and heart rates, where in fact seeing a professional is often therapeutic.’

IAM all in favour of the NHS becoming faster, better, cheaper and more efficient – but I’m not yet ready to be diagnosed by a robot. In fact, I wanted to call out loudly for a nurse when I read of a new NHS app that is being piloted alongside the 111 call service. Instead of ringing and speaking to a real person, you type in your symptoms and algorithms assess what’s likely to be wrong with you, and advise what you should do.

Seriously? Once I was spooning in some boiled egg and my brother made me laugh so much that I choked on a shard of eggshell. I collapsed on the way to school.

My mother rushed me to the children’s wing of University College Hospital, and told them what I’d inhaled.

At first the doctors didn’t believe her, but they whizzed me down to theatre and shoved a bronchoscope

JANET Jackson has had a baby at 50. Congratulations. The news makes me broody too – for grandchildren.

(a viewing tube) down my windpipe and into my lung.

A message was then relayed from the theatre to the ward: ‘Tell Mrs Johnson that we are indeed finding large fragments of eggshell in the patient.’

My mother was triumphant, and felt vindicated – rather less so, two days later, when my baby brother Jo was admitted to the same hospital, hallucinating and tripping out, after he’d crawled behind the washing machine in our house in Camden and eaten dry rot. She now had two children on the same ward.

On Thursday, I accompanied my mother, aged 74, to see her Parkinson’s professor at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. He went through her suite of conditions, felt her legs for responsiveness to touch, watched her walk, and checked her deep brain stimulation implant before my mother said: ‘I’m worried about this black toenail on my right foot… I Googled it and they say it could be a sign of melanoma.’

The neurologist raised an eyebrow. He examined my mother’s toe and reassured her that it was a bruise, or a side effect of her bloodthinning drugs. Can you imagine an algorithm, any artificial intelligent chatbot, that would do better in these unusual situations than 1. A loving mother who knew what her children had done; 2. The medical professionals who were prepared to believe her; and 3. A consultant who’d seen my mother regularly over many years in the same room of the same hospital?

As for the Doctor Bot app, well, we can no longer expect continuity of care as a right.

We sort of accept that. We are lucky to see a GP at all, let alone on the same day, so I agree that this app may be a stopgap when, for example, there are no appointments for a week and it’s Emergency Ward Ten at home. I am also perfectly prepared to believe that the app may become so clever that it could, in the end, outsmart doctors.

BUT the way to digitise the NHS is not to replace human contact with an app. Human contact and exchange between doctor and patient – I think of the professor’s tenderness over my mum’s big toe – is a red line. A doctor needs to inspect a patient face to face, to eyeball him, clock his appearance and vital signs, to get what’s wrong. You can tell a lot just by looking at someone, which is why doctors compare themselves to customs officials scanning the faces of travellers at Arrivals: they can spot things.

When I was in the consulting room, I noted that my mother’s file was four inches thick. In the course of the session, a nurse came in and slammed the next patient’s notes on the desk.

Of course, we must digitise the NHS, but these dog-eared folders made me think that one way of speeding things up generally would be to pop all our medical records on to an individual smartcard that we could carry round with us (if Tesco can do it, the NHS can, and such cards are in use in some parts of Africa). Then, wherever we are, in whatever hospital, surgery, or pharmacy, we can take back control of our data. We ‘own’ our continuity of care.

Surely that’s a safer and sounder way forward than ‘the doctor won’t see you now’ – even if there’s an app for that.