(A reverse parody in the style of Rory Sutherland)
Let’s imagine this in reverse, right?
Let’s imagine BookYourGP came first. A world where long-term condition care was just... sorted. Patients recalled automatically, intelligently. The right codes, the right time, the right channel. No one printing. No one chasing. Nurses knew exactly why the patient was in front of them. Clinical leads had audit trails. Admin teams didn’t cry in the toilets at lunchtime. Patients didn’t get missed. Or die.
Now imagine someone coming along and saying:
“I’ve got a better idea.”
Okay. So instead of just setting care logic once and letting the system track it forever... We’ll rebuild the entire recall process from scratch every single month using a Frankenstein’s monster of static searches, spreadsheets, tasks, templates, coloured highlighters and gut instinct.
And how do we decide who to recall? Based on clinical need? Risk stratification? Time since last review?
No. We’re going to do it based on birthdays.
Yes. That’s right. Month. Of. Birth.
You see, if someone happens to be born in August, we’ll recall them this month. Why? No reason. Just... because.
“Oh but that makes no clinical sense!” Exactly. It doesn’t. That’s the beauty of it.
So you’ve got a diabetic who hasn’t had bloods in 18 months? Too bad. It’s June. He was born in December. He can wait.
Meanwhile, someone else who had a full asthma review last month? Recall them again. Because it’s their birthday now. Happy birthday! Here’s a peak flow meter.
It’s like organising chemotherapy appointments based on horoscopes. “Ah yes, Mr Smith is a Sagittarius, so he’ll be getting his next dose in the first week of Advent.”
Okay. So now we’ve got a system where clinical urgency is irrelevant and chronological roulette is the guiding principle. Lovely.
Let’s press on.
So once we’ve run our searches (by month of birth, of course), what do we do? Print them. Obviously. On paper. Or maybe export them as CSV files and email them to the admin team, who’ll have a panic attack because Excel’s conditional formatting has glitched again.
Then we start phoning people. One by one. “Hello Mr Ahmed, just calling to remind you to book your asthma review.” “I had that last week.” “Oh. Well... come again?”
The patient asks: “What for?” And the receptionist has no idea. The nurse doesn’t know either. The GP is seeing ten patients an hour and triaging four hundred eConsults. The whole system is just hoping nobody asks too many questions.
And of course, no one checks what’s been done. They might have had the bloods. But was it the right bloods? Is the diabetic foot check done? Did the CKD patient get an ACR? Who knows. Let’s stick a task on for the GP and walk away slowly.
If something falls through the cracks? Well. C’est la vie.
This is how the NHS is doing long-term condition care in 2025:
But yes, by all means let’s recall 1/12th of the register every month based on when their parents had sex. That’s apparently fine.
And if you suggest replacing this nonsense with BookYourGP - a system that just does it properly - you get blank stares and a five-month pilot request.
“It’s important to validate that the automated recalls… work.”
Mate. We’ve validated that humans don’t. They forget. They miss people. They put sticky notes on monitors that fall off over the weekend.
And that’s the difference. BookYourGP works in data. The current system works in vibes.
So yes. Let’s imagine a world where BookYourGP never existed. Where month-of-birth recall logic is passed around like some ancient oral tradition. Where safety nets are whiteboards and everything depends on whether Shazia from reception remembered to tell Mo that Mrs Patel's BP was high again.
And then let’s snap out of it. Because that’s not a parody. That’s today. Right now.
And the only reason it still exists is because no one’s had the nerve to say: This is f**king insane.