The UK’s NHS Going Digital Would Be Equivalent to Hiring Thousands of New Doctors

In December last year, the UK’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, visited Singapore General Hospital, regarded as one of the best in the world. What he witnessed there surprised him: “Patients arrive having already registered their appointments via an app. They check in on touchscreen kiosks awaiting them at reception. Tablets at their bedside allow them to read about their treatment or call for assistance,” Streeting says. “This is Space Age stuff compared with where the NHS is today.” Streeting characterizes the National Health Service as an “analog system in a digital age.”
“When I visit a hospital, doctors often take out their pagers to show me what they are forced to work with,” Streeting says. According to estimates, 13.5 million hours of GPs’ time is wasted every year due to inadequate IT. Fixing that would be the equivalent of hiring 8,000 new NHS doctors. “For the past 14 years, modernization of the NHS has been put on the back burner by a Conservative government which opts for sticking plasters instead of the major surgery that’s required,” says Streeting, who added that he fears that five more years of Tory mismanagement could mean the NHS ends up like the failed British retailer Woolworths—“a much-loved national institution which failed to change with the times and was left behind.”
Central to Streeting’s plan to fix the NHS is the NHS app, which has been downloaded by 31 million people in England and Wales. “It has the potential to transform how the NHS interacts with patients and promote better public health,” he says. He points out that, for instance, only one in every 200 GP appointments are currently made via the app. “In too many cases, patients still wait on the phone at 8 am, or even queue up in person in the cold on a frosty morning just to see a doctor.”
The NHS app could not only allow appointments to be made, but also let patients receive notifications about vaccine campaigns, health tests, cancer screening, and even upcoming clinical trials. “Clinical trials can use genomics to identify patients who will benefit from the latest treatments, but they struggle to recruit—not for a lack of people willing to take part, but because they can’t access basic data,” he said. He promised that Labour would clamp down on bureaucracy and allow clinical trials to recruit volunteers via the app. “During the pandemic, half a million people signed up to the vaccine trials registry,” he says. “If we can do it to defeat Covid, we can do it to cure cancer.”
At the core of Labour’s plan is patient data. Recently, the NHS has announced the launch of a federated data platform that would centralize hospital data, but would not include general practice or social care data. “The NHS has struck gold here, yet it’s leaving it in the ground,” Streeting says. “General practice data is key to unlocking better population health outcomes.”
Streeting promises that a Labour government would ensure a transparent process about what aspects of patient data would be shared and with whom, as well as the necessary safeguards to ensure patient confidentiality. As for those who oppose it on the grounds of privacy concerns, he has a simple message: “It’s a fight that a Labour government is willing to have,” he says. “While the tinfoil hat brigade takes to TikTok to urge followers to opt out of sharing their data with the NHS—the irony isn’t lost on me—the government refuses to take on their fear mongering.”
He recalled when, last January, he met the parents of a 2-year-old boy at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. “They have been through hell,” he says. “In his short life, he has already had five operations on his heart.” When he asked them what their main frustration had been, however, the answer surprised him: technology. “Their local GP couldn’t access the notes from Alder Hey and the hospital couldn’t read the records held by their GP. It meant that on every appointment they had to repeat themselves again and again. The health service should be lessening their worry, not adding to their stress.”
This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.