New Medical Limited

I started my medical career as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1984. In 1987 I transferred to Oxford to complete my clinical studies and qualified in 1990. As a medical student I was fortunate to captain my College’s boat club, play rugby for both my Cambridge and Oxford Colleges’ first XVs and was elected president of the Middle Common Room (graduate student body).  While at Oxford, I spent my medical elective period with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Western Australia, based in Port Hedland.

After qualification, I spent several years working in the Oxford group of hospitals as part of a training programme to give me the necessary medical skills to enter general practice, culminating in a traineeship with Dr Peter Tate in Abingdon.  Shortly after passing the examination for Membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners, I joined my current practice in Marlow, South Bucks as a partner.  I maintain my membership of the RCGP, am a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and, as an enthusiastic traveller have also been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

During my medical training I developed an increasing awareness of the sometimes unspoken deficit between the medical care offered to patients and “best practice”, normally as a result of hidden rationing decisions about what a cash-limited health care system can achieve while remaining equally available to all.  I felt uneasy about patients not being given the best advice for their care, and not told that the advice they were getting was not what the doctor would necessarily provide for themselves, or a member of their family.

It was this perceived gap between best care and available care, a view that David Berger and I share, which led to us coming together with James Kraft to found New Medical.  In New Medical we wanted to create a highly ethical organisation that was able to take the best of modern evidence-based medicine and make it more widely available whether as a provider to the NHS or on a self-pay basis at a reasonable cost where there the NHS has chosen not to offer the service. I am proud of the service we offer. I believe that New Medical is meeting a real need and helping to save lives. Equally as importantly, it is helping to make medicine accessible and allow more members of the public a choice in how they look after themselves.