Where your first patients come from

You can picture the kind of care you’d want to give, and even believe it’s better than what most patients get under the current model. But the moment you imagine asking someone to hand you their medical management, you hesitate — it feels presumptuous, like asking for something you haven’t earned.

So don’t. Don’t ask people to become your patients; ask the people you know who else might want this. The difference sounds small, but it does a few things at once. You stop drawing on your own network and start drawing on your network’s network — the people they know, not just the people you know, which is far wider. You take the weight off the conversation, because you’re not standing in front of someone waiting for a yes; you’re asking them to picture someone else. And often enough the person you ask goes quiet for a second and says, “that actually sounds like me.”

The phrasing matters more than you’d think. Ask “do you know anyone who might want this?” and you’ve asked for a yes or a no, and neither one moves things along — a no ends it, and even a yes just sits there. Ask “who do you know who might want this?” instead, and the question does the opposite: it assumes there’s an answer, and gets the person reaching for a name. Almost everyone has one — a parent with diabetes who waits weeks for an appointment, a colleague who’s just moved and has no GP, an elderly neighbour who needs checking in on.

When someone does think of a name, you want to be easy to hand over. A one-line description of what you do, a WhatsApp profile that says it, a number people know will actually reach you — small things that add up. A doctor whose number is in two hundred phones gets called; one whose number is in twenty doesn’t.

Open your contact list, then your siblings’ and your parents’, and a message that travels through all of it reaches a few hundred people. You don’t need a few hundred. The whole point of the model is continuity — you see the same people often, rather than a new patient through the door every fifteen minutes — so the list was never meant to grow long. You need about five people to start. Out of five hundred, five isn’t much to ask for.

And if you’re worried you don’t really know how to do this yet — you don’t, and nobody does at first. So say so. Offer the first consultation or two at no charge, not as a discount but as the plain truth: you’re still learning to deliver this kind of care, you believe it leads to better outcomes, and you’d like the chance to show it. People will give you that chance. And when the care is genuinely more personal and more continuous, it travels by word of mouth quicker than you’d think — even the ones who don’t stay on will mention you to someone who does.