A day a week lost to paperwork: what new NHS research tells us

Introduction

New research commissioned by NHS Shared Business Services reveals that almost three in ten NHS staff now spend more than 10 hours a week on administrative tasks.

Scaled across the workforce, that's roughly 430 million hours a year, the equivalent of 220,000 full-time roles' worth of time spent on admin rather than care.

In this post, we take a detailed look at what’s causing the problem, and how healthcare providers like Northamptonshire NHS Foundation Trust are using AI to bring the focus back from paperwork to patients. 

Duplicated processes and creaking IT are driving the burden

The new research claims that 92% of staff deal with inefficient or duplicated processes every week, and the same number runs into IT system issues just as often. 

At a time where staff placements are at an all time low, these problems impact much more than just efficiency. 

Among those affected, 87% say it's had a negative impact on their work or their wellbeing, and 51% say it's contributed to stress or burnout. 30% are regularly working beyond their contracted hours to keep up, and 25% say it's delaying decisions.

And it’s not just staff who are impacted.

34% of respondents say the admin burden is cutting into time they'd otherwise spend with patients.

Staff know exactly what would help

When asked what would make the biggest difference, the answers weren't wishful thinking. 

• 67% want more integrated systems across NHS teams
• 56% want greater standardisation of systems and processes
• 45% want more reliable operational platforms
• 26% would welcome automation of routine admin tasks.

In other words, staff aren't asking for another tool bolted onto an already crowded stack. They're asking for something that fits into how they already work and takes the repetitive, duplicated parts off their plate.

Using AI to reduce the admin burden in the NHS

The NHS SBS findings match what healthcare teams already using Beam are seeing.

Northamptonshire clinicians reclaimed almost a day a week

At Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, clinicians in children and young people's services were spending 16.5 hours a week writing up documentation. Reports got finished in the evenings, and diagnostic long-form reports for ADHD and autism could take days.

Thirty-nine clinicians across CAMHS, community paediatrics, speech and language therapy, and other CYP services ran a 12-week pilot of Notes, recording sessions and generating structured drafts. A second pilot ran with 29 clinicians in the musculoskeletal team.

By the end of the twelve weeks, CYP clinicians had cut weekly admin from 16.5 hours to 10, saving more than 6.5 hours each. That's almost a full working day back. In MSK, every clinician on the pilot said Notes helped them enjoy their role more.

Your Healthcare cut the write-up time on assessment reports

People waiting for an ADHD or autism assessment at Your Healthcare faced around two years in the queue. Each report took roughly six hours to complete, which capped how many assessments the team could get through in a week.

Twenty-eight clinicians piloted Notes for eight weeks, using it in sessions and uploading existing documents to draft reports against their standard templates. They completed assessment reports 2.8 times faster, saving about three hours and 47 minutes each. Across the pilot, that added up to 616 hours.

Before the pilot, 65% said admin was harming their wellbeing. Afterwards, 19% did.

The CHC team at Hampshire and Isle of Wight sped up the DST

Continuing Healthcare assessments involve hours of evidence gathering before anyone writes a word of the Decision Support Tool. At NHS Hampshire and Isle of Wight, six clinicians ran an 8-week pilot across 96 DSTs, using Notes to pull evidence together beforehand and capture MDT discussions against the relevant domains.

Evidence gathering dropped by 51% and the write-up ran 68% faster. Start to finish, clinicians completed DSTs 55% faster, saving an average of 112 minutes per assessment. The wider team handles around 1,500 DSTs a year, so at that rate they'd save roughly 4,500 hours and an estimated £135,000 annually.

Every clinician on the pilot said they enjoyed their role more.

AI won't fix a broken system, but it can help

Clinical teams are doing more of their work in the community. They run more assessments, and they support more people with mental health needs and complex care outside hospital, along with the documentation that comes with it. Most of those teams were stretched before any of this started.

They follow these cases for months, sometimes years, and rarely on their own. A nurse writing up an NHS Continuing Healthcare assessment needs the full history behind the case, and a short note captured automatically during a ten-minute appointment won't give them that. We built Beam for that kind of work.

Clinical teams have been here before with electronic patient records and dictation software. They kept using the tools they helped shape, where someone funded the rollout properly. They dropped the ones their organisation bought as a licence and then left alone.

Healthcare providers use Beam to take documentation work off their clinical teams, safely and quickly, so their people spend more time with patients and produce records they can stand behind.