Family doctors are being offered up to R1,5 million a year to carry out private webcam appointments.
Attendees at the conference of the Royal College of GPs are being handed flyers urging them to sign up with a firm that offers consultations via computer or mobile.
They can do as many hours as they want – either from home or from their surgeries – in between their NHS patients.
Yet there is a severe recruitment crisis and as many as one in eight GP posts are unfilled.
The head of the royal college warned at the conference that doctors were so overworked and exhausted they were putting patients at risk.
The college is being paid £12,000 by private firm Babylon to be allowed to hand out flyers and hold sessions at the conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, attended by more than 1,600 family doctors.
Babylon is one of a growing number of companies offering private webcam appointments for which patients pay £25 for a 15-minute slot.
GPs earn up to £60 an hour and the firm encourages them to do at least one four-hour shift a week in between their surgery hours. Some have quit their NHS posts completely to work full-time from home on salaries of £90,000.
The flyers handed out at the conference promise GPs ‘flexible hours’ and the ‘freedom to work from home or from your workplace’.
Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association said it was disconcerting that the firm was at the conference.
‘This means that NHS doctors are being targeted to give up their role working for our NHS and instead work for private companies, which I think most patients would consider unethical,’ she added. ‘When the NHS is so desperately short of GPs, how can this be right?’
Other doctors have raised concerns that these online consultations are unsafe because serious medical conditions could be missed.
Doctors do not have access to patients’ files and might not spot symptoms that would otherwise be recognised in a face-to-face appointment.
Babylon is also running a stand at the conference centre with staff handing out stress balls, balloons and packets of nuts and dried fruit.
Joyce Robins of Patient Concern said: ‘It’s disgraceful. They can’t fulfil their contracts and do their proper work for patients if they’re working privately. If they want to be private doctors, so be it but they shouldn’t take the NHS’s money and go and work for someone else.’
The royal college is the professional body for GPs and has over 50,000 members.
Its chairman Dr Maureen Baker has warned that doctors were so overworked they posed a ‘real threat to patient safety’.
Surgeries are struggling to cope with the pressures of migration, the aging population and a recruitment crisis among family doctors.
Set up in 2014, Babylon has 100 GPs working full or part-time providing webcam appointments.
A spokesman for the RCGP said: ‘The decision to allow Babylon to become a bronze sponsor at this year’s conference was taken on the basis that it is an emerging digital healthcare company.
‘At the moment, general practice in the UK is struggling, and we need to pull out all the stops to recruit as many GPs to the NHS as possible, and retain existing ones.
‘But that is not to say we are in a position to close the doors to opportunities for our members. Babylon’s presence at the conference is in line with the college’s sponsorship policies.
‘Due to commercial confidentiality we are unable to disclose further details of the sponsorship.’
Some GP surgeries have started paying firms to offer consultations on webcam to try to cut waiting times.
The schemes in Southend and Oldham cover 31,000 patients.
Daily Mail