About
About HarleyDoc
Our CEO, Dr Tony Banerjee, started his journey in Yorkshire, being born into a medical family and is British-educated and medically-trained. He attended school in Yorkshire, and qualified from the University of Leicester with his MBChB degree. His training jobs were in hospital medicine and surgery back home in Yorkshire, qualifying as a General Practitioner in 2006.
He was working in a heavily-deprived part of the country as a GP Partner with 18,000 patients, and this made it his life’s work to tackle health inequalities that exist in society. He was elected twice consecutively to the role of NHS Chairman for his regional commissioning group, and oversaw the expenditure of a £530 million budget, which provided services for a population of over 300,000 patients.
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Background
This gave him an unparalleled insight into how healthcare works on a local, regional and financial level, being heavily involved in not just the clinical care of patients but also the commissioning of services for the regional population. This dual-role in medicine and management on a daily basis has helped him work closely with patients in the NHS and private sector, having a macroscopic view of the health landscape.
He moved to London in early 2010s and he has worked as a private and NHS GP since then. He was a Lead GP at Hurley Group for seven years looking after a patient population of 15,000 patients before merging with a sister practice of similar size pre-lockdown forming a mega-practice of nearly 30,000 patients. This provided a huge logistical challenge but the merger went well and is now thriving.
Hospital Services
For a long period of his time within General Practice, despite being extremely proud to work within the public sector, he felt that the NHS has been increasingly struggling to cope with demand and that patient experience, clinician experience and standard of care was dipping routinely below the standard that he expected, and through this, decided to set up his own private practice.
With time, this has grown to a small but manageable number of patients, but he spotted an opportunity to deliver high personalized standards of healthcare in the private sector as a viable and affordable alternative to the unfortunate sluggishness of the National Health Service, which has become even more so post-Covid lockdown as hospital services are stretched even further and “winter pressures” have now become “year-round pressures”.
He is unashamedly proud of the NHS having been diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer aged just 23y old whilst working as a junior doctor, and also being a Long-Covid sufferer himself more recently. He is a passionate fundraiser for charities as a result of his own ill-health experiences, and has generously donated tens of thousands of pounds through his fundraising efforts, including running the London Marathon with his brothers, both of whom are also doctors.
Experiences
He feels that his own health experiences have given him a privileged view into what life is like not just as a doctor, but also as a patient, and that this powerful angle has helped him communicate on a level with his clients and their families that many other clinicians are unable to.
Despite this pride in the NHS, he also felt that patients were not getting their deserved positive experiences with their NHS healthcare, but also that clinicians were becoming increasingly disgruntled with the standard of care that they wanted to give to patients, but due to pressures outside of their control, that they were not able to deliver consistently. There was once a time when primary and secondary care worked very closely together, and increasingly this relationship has become fractured to the point that we see today, and this was the starting point for where Dr Banerjee sees patient care becoming more joined up again for the benefit of the patient’s health.
HarleyDoc’s mission is to deliver high quality concierge-style private healthcare to the public, and it does so by employing only the most carefully-vetted, highly-qualified and experienced of GPs and Hospital Consultants, who all share Dr Banerjee’s universal vision for healthcare delivery.
He also has a lot of multinational clients, who spend part of the year in London, and then often go to their other bases in South of France and the Middle East. For this reason, Dr Banerjee is also in the process of setting up HarleyDoc bases in Monaco and Dubai to cater for the need for bespoke healthcare solutions for this subgroup of client and their families alike.
Special Interests
Through Dr Banerjee’s own experience, he has developed lots of special interests that he has undertaken training in, including aesthetics, skin surgery, mental ill-health and sports injuries, to name but a few. His vision is to offer this experience and that of his carefully selected clinicians to the general public in a broad but manageable way when they need it, and not in several weeks or months when the next available appointment is.
He has run several businesses including an aesthetics and skin surgery business, as well as having active interests in properties, classic cars and fine art.
Outside of his clinical work, he is a standup comedian and a DJ, and lives with his dog Diego the Dogue de Bordeaux, and is a passionate networker, frequently seen at Soho Houses worldwide.
