Britain’s GP crisis could be eased by doctors in Singapore offering virtual appointments to patients, a think tank has claimed.
The Social Market Foundation (SMF) argued that Singapore’s medics would help reduce waste and inefficiency, and instead save “our beleaguered national healthcare system” from its “serious decline”.
Disgruntled patients have left NHS operations during the appointments crisis and decided to go private. Others have attended A&E instead, which campaigners say has put additional pressure on flooded victim units.
The SMF also argued that ‘outpatient clinics’, where patients with long-term conditions are treated by a team of doctors, nurses and health coordinators, would prove a cost-effective solution to tackling the post-Covid NHS backlog.
It claimed that Singapore spends 4.4 percent of its national income on healthcare – less than half as much as Britain – but “delivers much better results”.
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The infant mortality rate is also half that of Britain, while the population is less obese and has a longer life expectancy.
With Britons already using remote health services involving Singaporean GPs, a “natural” next step would be to let the medics prescribe medicines to patients in Britain, the SMF paper said.
Their practice also complies with the guidelines of public hospitals and medical clinics, ensuring “a high standard of medical care,” it added.
If the move were successful, the NHS could deploy the service to rural areas, which suffer from limited access to local GPs.
The latest NHS figures show that 17.6 million appointments taking place in England in 2023 were booked a month earlier – or one in twenty.
It represents an increase of more than a third in one year.
Nearly a fifth of appointments (17.5 percent) were booked fourteen days in advance, an increase from 15.2 percent in 2022.
According to the article’s other recommendations, ‘outpatient clinics’ should also be established in parts of England with poorer access to primary care.
These clinics would combine GP services with laboratories that can carry out diagnostic tests, and multidisciplinary teams that can care for people with chronic health conditions.
In his foreword to the paper, former Health Secretary Lord Norman Warner argued that “the time has come to revisit these ideas and build on Singapore’s experience.”
He added: ‘Politicians know radical change is needed, but are afraid to explain to their voters what is needed.
“Part of the problem is that they don’t have models to draw on and cite as a way forward.”
‘Polyclinics’ were first introduced in Britain in 2008, when Lord Darzi, then Health Minister under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, tried to set up ‘one-stop shops’ across the country.
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But the plans were soon abandoned and the British Medical Journal labeled them ‘expensive white elephants’.
They were dismantled under the coalition government.
According to the GP Patient Survey 2023, a survey of 759,000 Britons, only seven in ten (71.3 percent) described their overall experience of their GP practice as ‘good’. Satisfaction has fallen to an all-time low.
Less than half of patients (49.8 percent) also indicate that they can easily reach the GP practice by telephone, compared to 52.7 percent in 2022 and 80.8 percent in 2012.
According to recommendations from the BMA and the European Union of General Practitioners, GPs in Britain should now make no more than 25 appointments per day to ensure ‘safe care’.
But some doctors are reportedly having to cram in almost 90 patients a day in some areas amid an appointment crisis.
Nationally, there were 27,487 fully qualified, full-time GPs practicing in England in December, an average of one GP for every 2,078 patients.
Health chiefs say the ratio of patients to each fully qualified GP should never exceed 1,800.