A day in the life

A day in the life of Dr Paul Ettlinger, founder and lead clinician at The London General Practice

Interview: Jean-Paul Aubin-Parvu / Images: Orlando Gili

I am a great believer in the importance of personal care during this modern technological age. This means guiding and helping patients through the avenues of private medicine with a real human touch, but with all the available up-to-date facilities, technologies and clinical guidelines, ensuring that they get the very best medical care.

We will look after absolutely anyone who wants to have private medical care, from people who live locally through to patients flying in from all over the world. We look after various companies and do a lot of executive health screenings. We also look after several embassies and many of the five-star hotels in London. Claridge’s and The Connaught, for example—we are their doctors.

As founder and lead clinician, I look after and supervise the medical

management of the practice to make sure we’re maintaining excellent standards, but I also see patients on a daily basis. I am also one of the lead medical officers for the entertainment insurance industry and as such I’m often asked to review cases—for example, to assess the risk for medical underwriting for performers and film actors.

I tend to get up between 6.30am and 6.45am. I am someone who gets up instantly rather than lying there hitting the snooze button. I must have a very strong internal body clock because I often wake up just one minute before the alarm is due to go off.

Depending on the weather I will either cycle to work on a hire bike or arrange for a cab to pick me up. Sitting in the back of the car gives me a great opportunity to catch up with emails and review any results that may have come in overnight.

I arrive at the practice by around 7.30am, but I won’t usually see my first patient until nine o’clock. I always tell my patients that this is a good time to phone me if there’s an issue. I might tell them to pop in and see me at 8.30am. I can even do a visit on my way into the office if the patient isn’t well enough to travel.

We tend to finish the clinical work at about 7.30, 8pm. We have a number of doctors consulting at the practice each day and so we also have clinical meetings together. Then there are our practice meetings and clinical governance meetings. We are very strong on our clinical governance structure.

For us, it’s all about striving to give each patient the very best personal care—that’s the philosophy throughout our practice. We also provide a 24-hour visiting service. Our phones are always answered, and if it’s out of hours then the call is automatically transferred to the on-call doctor, who can assess whether the patient requires a visit.

The beauty of working in Harley Street is if a patient needs a scan, for example, you can ask them to sit in the waiting room while you arrange the investigation and then get that patient to come back to you straightaway with the report, so you can make a diagnosis instantly. You can get laboratory tests really quickly. You can walk round to the laboratory and have the results back within the hour. I don’t think you can do that anywhere else in the UK, actually. This is what the Harley Street Medical Area offers.

There have been many, many challenges of practising as a GP during the COVID pandemic, one of them being that I actually had the disease myself at the very beginning and was extremely ill with it. This was back in mid-March 2020. But I pulled through. I think that gave me a greater understanding of the disease and an empathy towards those patients who have unfortunately suffered with it. It also gave me a yearning to be at the forefront of providing services to patients during this pandemic.

We had to shut our premises during the first lockdown, but we kept the phone lines open. We had to ensure that our staff were able to work from home and could answer calls. We introduced video and telephone consultations to allow us to continue offering care to all our patients, and we could also offer a visiting service provided the patient wasn’t suffering any COVID symptoms. Having already been fairly computer literate and technology savvy we had to instantly educate ourselves and learn even more about the digital sphere. Obviously, we had to ensure that all the government guidelines and protocols were fulfilled. It was a difficult period, but we continued to offer the best care we possibly could.

We introduced our COVID-19 Safety Net service for patients concerned or affected by coronavirus. After an initial video consultation with one of our doctors, the patient receives a home support pack which includes an oxygen saturation meter with pulse monitor and, if required, a thermometer and blood pressure monitor. Then each day for the next seven days one of

our doctors will contact the patient by telephone or video consultation to check on their symptoms, discuss the measurements they have taken—sent via a digital app created in partnership with Careology—and provide general support. Our patients have found this service very reassuring, knowing that someone is actually looking after them and, if need be, can advise them to seek further specialist help.

We have introduced other services in direct response to the pandemic including coronavirus testing—we were very fortunate that our laboratories were able to offer us a very prompt service from the beginning—and Fit to Fly coronavirus test certificates. When people are able to start leaving the country again, I think there will be a further increase in patients wishing to take advantage of that service.

This has obviously been a very worrying time, particularly for the most vulnerable patients. I still have some patients who haven’t left their house since last February. I think there has been a large amount of fear engendered in the population and, of course, there has been an increase in mental health issues, which we’ve seen from all spheres actually. The anxiety that COVID has developed in patients is within all populations of society, and really isn’t related to which socio-economic group you might fall in. We will be dealing with it for many years to come.