Will Hancock’s ‘Zoom medicine’ take off?

It’s not unusual that the left and right hands of government don’t know what the other is doing: despite being based in the same postcode, different departments are notoriously bad at communicating. They even stop speaking to one another occasionally, with secretaries of state blocking new policies at what is known as the ‘write-round’ stage of policy development. This is where ministers consult colleagues across government on a policy, which others can then block. Sometimes departments have such a strong objection to a policy in another ministry that they refuse to sign off anything else through write-rounds until this plan is dropped. But this polite form of hostage-taking is far less common than the practice of announcing something without thinking about whether it makes any sense in the wider context of what the government is doing.

With that in mind, it’s worth asking whether Matt Hancock thought through his call for doctors to switch to ‘Zoom medicine’ in the context of what the government wants to do with healthcare.