The recent UK election campaign was filled with a whole range of promises from the various candidates, but one that was particularly interesting was the Conservative pledge to make access to GPs slightly easier.
In many ways, the pledge to offer seven day a week access to a GP is a welcome one, but I can’t help but sense that it is still rather behind the times, especially in an increasingly global healthcare environment.
The current situation with GPs is often far from acceptable for patients honed in an incredibly responsive and flexible environment. Appointments are often only available during work hours, and the time offered to you is seldom the time where you actually see your doctor, so a sizable chunk of your day is spent away from work, especially if your home GP is some distance from where you work.
Drop in centers are designed to offer an alternative, but these facilities are usually so busy that waiting times typically extend into hours rather than minutes.
A new Dutch service, called CareToGo, is aiming to improve matters, and may offer some lessons for the NHS.
Rather than offer up extended opening hours, they are instead hoping to make the receipt of healthcare more convenient by situating their walk in clinics in Central Station, in The Hague, thus providing people with a chance to visit a doctor on their way to or from work.
Appointments can be scheduled online (although it isn’t clear how rigorously these appointment times are kept), with the hope then that it will be a much smoother and more efficient process.
The service is a private one, with €27.25 securing you a 12 minute consultation, and any notes generated through the visit are then made available to your regular GP.
For half of that fee, the patient can instead receive a consultation over the telephone or via Skype, which is arguably a more useful service than visiting a train station.
Is it likely to make visiting your doctor a more convenient process? I have my doubts, and they still do little to help keep people healthy in the first place, which is surely a priority for any health system.
Nevertheless, it’s an interesting project that will be worth keeping tabs on.
Interesting idea but it seems to be transplanting big queues from walk in centres to these new places. What's the difference?
Like Ryan, I'm not really sure of the point of this. Walk in clinics aren't that inconvenient already, in terms of location anyway, but they are inconvenient because of the huge queues you always get in them. I'm not sure how this will solve that.