Daily Insight: The NHS’s new front door

One third of all patient interactions with the NHS will occur digitally within the next five years, according to NHS England’s national director for digital channels.

Joe Harrison, who is also CEO at Milton Keynes Hospital, said this target is both achievable and “conservative”, asserting that the NHS app has the potential to “fundamentally” change the relationship between citizens and the NHS.

The aim is for the NHS app to become the “digital front door” of the NHS, reducing the burden placed on GPs and emergency departments by empowering patients with more information and control over their health.

It is a significant departure from five years ago when then chief executive of NHSX Matthew Gould rubbished the idea of an “all singing, all dancing” NHS app and advised against making it a digital front door.

The obvious difference between then and now is the small matter of a pandemic. More than 33 million people have now downloaded the NHS app, many of whom did so in 2021 when covid-19 passports were introduced.

Many now use the app to view appointment letters, order repeat prescriptions and view their health record. The next 12 months will see more features added, with a focus on “wellness” and preventive health.

It may not yet be cutting edge stuff, but as Joe Harrison said, “you’ve got to start somewhere”.

The missing millions

In the midst of a crisis that has seen police called in to break up queues outside practices and desperate patients resorting to DIY dentistry, HSJ has learned that hundreds of millions earmarked for NHS dentists is going unspent.

In the worst-performing areas – Hampshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk – close to a third of the dental budget is not being utilised (and likely siphoned off to balance deficits elsewhere).

The integrated care boards said they were trying to spend the cash but coming up against a shortage of dentists willing to work on the widely-discredited national contract.

However experts said ICBs did have the power to work innovatively – pointing to the example of Greater Manchester, which has utilised 98 per cent of its allocation.

Dental funding is supposedly ringfenced, but NHSE has given the green light for underspends to be used to support the bottom line. In one instance, practices in the East Midlands were told funding to see new patients was being pulled due to deteriorating finances.

As Mark Dayan, of the Nuffield Trust thinktank, put it: “Dental contracting and payment is so broken that many people cannot receive care even when the health service has money to pay for it.”