Bupa responds to fears about its remote consultation contract
Bupa’s head of consultant and therapist management Kristopher Martindale responds to FIPO’s concerns about its new remote consultation contract.
We believe it is important to offer remote consultations and that their use will continue to grow in future.
Kris Martindale
In March, we temporarily held our standard requirement for a remote consultations contract so that all consultants could offer Bupa patients this care during the pandemic. We are grateful that so many consultants adopted this way of interacting with patients so that they could continue to receive the care they needed.
We have since updated our remote consultations contract to reflect our learnings through the pandemic. This included findings from a consultant survey on remote consultations, which received 2,623 responses.
Our findings confirmed that remote consultations need as much preparation, can be as complex and can take as much time as face-to-face consultations.
Over 85% of survey respondents said it was reasonable to receive the same fees for remote initial consultations as current face-to-face fees. In recognition of these insights, we will continue to pay the same fees for remote consultations as face-to-face appointments.
The new contract focuses on ensuring patient safety in line with current GMC guidance and maintaining patient experience, quality and value for money for all Bupa patients.
For these reasons, we are asking all consultants offering remote consultations to agree to these terms. We have highlighted the key contract updates to consultants and encourage them to read the terms to ensure they are comfortable.
In reference to video recordings, we have updated our terms to make it clearer that we expect the date, time and notes of a consultant to be logged in the same way as a face-to-face appointment.
Consultants do not need to keep a video recording of all appointments, unless both the patient and consultant would prefer this.
We have over 20,000 consultants in our network, whom we are writing to about new contract terms in phases. Consultants who have contacted us about the contract will receive reminders to complete their e-signature, though these have been changed to weekly and can be turned off through the ‘unsubscribe’ link in the email
We plan to have contacted all consultants by the end of January 2021.
In the meantime, those who have yet to receive the new contract terms can continue to offer remote consultations and invoice for them as they have done to date.
As always, we will keep this process under review and keep consultants updated as our approach to remote consultations evolves.