Personalised care
Patients
I created this website is for you, because there is simply too much information that can come across at a time when you have been just diagnosed with an illness and I want you to be able to access this information at your leisure, at home and with your family. You will also find a list of pages that provides information about your consultation, operation and news updates that may be of interest.
After spending time on the site, you will be well informed and when we meet, we can focus on your options and choices.
You are in charge and in control
When we first meet, you may notice that my approach to patient information and choice may be different from what you may be used to because I believe that both of us (patient and doctor) should make decisions about your care together.
Many patients (and doctors) don’t realise that patients are the best people to be in charge of the decision about their care. With a formal background in clinical trials, medical statistics and having reviewed the literature extensively, I am in a position to say that many decisions in clinical practice are not “medical” a few are “clear cut”.
The General Medical Council and I (as part of the British Guidelines committee for the Radical Management of Lung Cancer) emphasise that benefits and risks of any treatment or investigation should be explained to the patient and decisions about their care should be made together.
This is because “medical decisions” are made for each specific treatment when the perceived benefits outweigh the risks. Whilst doctors can inform you on the benefits and risks for each modality of your care, how people place a value on benefit and risk is subjective so only you can decide what is important to you.
You are at the driving seat of your care. I’ll provide the route map, and we’ll plan the journey together
Sometimes, it can be difficult to decide and patients may ask “what do you recommend?” or “what would you do if you were me?” and my reply is an explanation that it is difficult to put myself in your shoes because my values are yours may be quite different. So allow me to explore your values… and then we go on to dissect what is and is not important for me to allow me to help you with the decision.
You tend to make the correct decisions about your care
Making a decision can be difficult and you may wonder if you have made a correct decision whether to accept or turn down the offer of an operation. I can say that patients tend to make the correct decisions for themselves. It is not simply a reassuring platitude. We surveyed patients to came to see me in my clinic with poor lung function in whom surgery had the potential to make their lung function worse. Both the patients who chose surgery and those who declined it were equally highly satisfied with their decisions when surveyed approximately one year later.
Private patients
I take great pride in providing personalized, bespoke care and to ensure I am personally available to advise my private funding clientele (of a mix of insured and self-funding patients).
Insurance companies have made relationships with specialists incredibly challenging by persistently lowering their coverage, introducing bureaucratic third party agent(s) for claims and become effectively closed for discussion. Due to the inordinate amount of time spent on the insurance process, significant unpaid insurance debts (I chose to write off so as not to pass the costs to my patients), from 1 April 2022, I have decided to work only with self-funding patients with the exception of a highly selected range of insurance companies such as BUPA Global, Allianz, Cigna international (if your insurance company is not listed, do contact my office to check).
My decision also serves to lower my total clinical workload so I am able to provide more sustainable, higher quality and focused care for a highly selective clientele.