New Medical Limited

I qualified in medicine from London University in 1991 and did my junior hospital jobs in and around London in the dying days of when junior doctors were exhausted and patients were scared. In 1995, I passed my MRCP postgraduate examination in internal medicine and promptly left the world of high technology for the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, where my wife Carol and I formed 2/3 of a team of three doctors looking after 60,000 people spread over millions of square miles of ocean.

From this primitive idyll of canoe tours and snorkelling after work, we spent a short time in Switzerland at the University Hospital of Geneva, before returning to general practice training in North Devon.

While there, and at the dawn of the Internet, I became fired by the Motley Fool, an American website devoted to demystifying the world of finance for the benefit of ordinary people. In due course, I founded the UK branch (www.fool.co.uk) and went on to write the bestselling Motley Fool UK Investment Guide. The Motley Fool UK continues to go from strength to strength as a free-to-air Internet content provider, but in 2001 it was time to give up the media circus and go back into medicine. You don’t devote years of your life to a vocation like medicine to give it up completely.

Boy, was it a shock, though. In the business world, survival had meant doing everything you could to satisfy your customer. In the NHS, however, I soon found that survival was about doing everything you could to limit the demands of your customer, even if they were entirely reasonable. There were quite a few, highly effective ways of doing this: keep them ignorant, make services inconvenient or difficult to access, be rude and unwelcoming, limit access through “clinical evidence” guidelines, delay access until patients died or their conditions became untreatable. The list was long and the practices widespread, but that didn’t make it right.

By 2002, it was too much and with another like-minded GP, Dr. James Morrow, and James Kraft, who was our Managing Director at the Motley Fool, I formed New Medical. We reckoned that people would appreciate the option to safeguard their health, especially if it was easy and convenient. To date, we have screened over 8,000 individuals for abdominal aortic aneurysm and osteoporosis, using highly qualified staff and the best equipment. Soon, we will be offering screening for bowel cancer and the list of people whose lives have been saved, or whose health has been safeguarded, by our services will grow even faster.

In addition to our independent sector screening services, we are now working with GPs around the country to offer innovative services to patients within the NHS through Practice-Based Commissioning. We will continue to be at the vanguard of delivering quality healthcare to patients, at times and in locations convenient for them, both within the independent sector and underneath the NHS umbrella.

It’s an exciting time and please drop me an email at david.berger@newmedical.co.uk with any ideas or suggestions on how we can develop or improve our services.