There are thousands of victims of violent crimes in the UK every year and medical evidence is needed to charge suspects. To date, obtaining medical evidence has been problematic, tedious and cumbersome, leading to delays, miscarriages of justice and more violent crimes, either as retaliatory actions or against new victims.
Historically, this process took approximately 2-3 months. But why? We investigated the specifics and found that it was likely due to a confluence of factors, including:
Reports must be written on-site at a hospital, often after long shifts but writing reports are not part of a physician’s NHS responsibilities
The police must contract with individual doctors and constantly chase them to get reports
Only 15% of reports are paid for, leading to an unwillingness to write them
And because there were so many issues, no one looked for a solution … until now.
Dr Johann Grundlingh is an NHS Emergency Medicine and Intensive Care Consultant who has experienced the impact of hospitals not providing medical assault reports in a timely and accurate fashion. He’s worked with multiple police forces on numerous reports but always thought there was a better way to do things. After getting his MBA in 2018, he and classmate Suyash Shrivastava started SFR Medical and piloted different approaches during the first year of business. Through that experience, they realized that addressing the controllable pain points and using a different but well-known form (the SFR) could drastically improve the situation for everyone involved.
Our business was born.
We know that the police have more important things to do with their time than constantly follow-up on the status of their medical report. We also know that doctors would prefer to see and help patients rather than get bogged down by paperwork. So our solution was two-fold: (1) put a single point of contact into place, our dedicated Client Relationship Managers whose sole job is to manage the workflow, and (2) recruit a team of freelance medical transcribers, who can write the reports on their own time, in a place of their choosing while being confident that they will get paid for the work they produce.
Since then, we’ve written a few thousand reports (under co-founder Lucy Grundlingh’s guidance), partnered with multiple hospitals, and are associated with Innovate UK, The Forward Institute and The LBS Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship. And oh yea, in 2019, we brought on an additional co-founder, Lisa Helfer, to help us grow the business.
