GPs Are Losing £410 a Day to Hidden Work. Can Technology Change That?

Putting a Price on the Invisible

Every so often a report lands that says out loud what a lot of people have been muttering for years. The Royal College of General Practitioners’ new paper, Tackling the GP workload crisis, is one of those. It manages to do something the sector has struggled with for a long time: it puts a number on the work nobody sees.

That number is £410. Not per week, not per month. Per GP, per day. It is the average equivalent cost of the “unnecessary” and hidden work an English GP gets through on a typical day, drawn from research the College commissioned from Apollo Innovation and Here and published back in December. The headline report builds on that study alongside a survey of 2,316 GPs across the UK, and the picture it paints is bleak, but to my eye, fixable.

To be clear about what “hidden workload” actually means: it is not patients. English general practice delivered more than 375 million appointments in 2025. The hidden stuff is everything around the consultation — the chasing, the re-referring, the manual data entry, the form-filling for agencies that are not even part of the NHS, the safety-netting for failures elsewhere in the system. Work that is real, often genuinely essential, frequently done after hours, and almost entirely uncounted in funding or workforce planning.

A Quarter of the Day, Gone

Here is the stat that stopped me. GPs report spending 25.3% of their time on administrative work and bureaucracy that is related to clinical care but does not actually improve patient outcomes. NHS England’s own figures put more than 30% of GP time on tasks like fit notes and certification. Whichever number you take, a GP is losing the best part of a day each week to paperwork that a better-designed system simply would not generate.

And it has consequences you cannot paper over. Fewer than a third of GPs (29%) feel they have enough time in an appointment to build the kind of relationship that good care actually depends on. The College’s chair, Professor Victoria Tzortziou Brown, put it plainly when the report came out, saying GPs are being asked to pick up work that should sit elsewhere in the system. That is the heart of it. The problem is not lazy doctors or inefficient practices. It is a system that has quietly offloaded its own friction onto the people least able to absorb more of it.

The Referral Maze

If you want a single, concrete example of how this happens, look at referrals. In the time-and-motion part of the research, 91% of GPs said they spend time navigating referral processes, at an estimated £94 per GP per day. Most reported 25 to 30 minutes a day on referral and follow-up admin: re-issuing prescriptions, re-sending referrals that bounced back, manually keying information into forms that do not talk to one another.

The report has a useful pair of terms for this. “Displaced demand” is work shifted into general practice from somewhere else. “Failure demand” is work created when a service does not get it right first time and the patient ends up back at their GP. A lot of the daily grind is one or the other, and GPs absorb it largely out of a sense of duty, because if they do not, someone falls through a gap.

England has had initiatives aimed squarely at this. The Red Tape Challenge and the Getting It Right First Time programme’s “Bridging the interface” work both set out to clarify who is responsible for what. The frustrating part, as the College points out, is that the Red Tape Challenge’s full findings still have not been published, which makes it rather hard to hold anyone to account for acting on them.

Clunky Systems Are Part of the Problem

This is the section of the report I find most interesting, because it is the part that is most obviously a technology problem, and technology problems are, in principle, solvable.

GPs are blunt about their IT. Just over a quarter (27%) reported IT-related delays every single day. Only 21% felt their system’s ability to exchange information with secondary care was fit for purpose. When asked what would actually help, the answers were emphatic:

None of this is exotic. We are not talking about moonshots. We are talking about systems that pass information cleanly from one part of the health service to another without a GP rekeying it by hand. Standardised e-templates and some sensible automation could take a genuine bite out of the repetitive work — referrals, diagnostic follow-ups, the endless licensing and insurance forms. The technology to do this has existed for years. What has been missing is interoperability and the will to mandate it.

Where AI Comes In, and Where It Doesn’t

You cannot write about workload in 2026 without talking about AI, and the report does not dodge it. The Government’s 10 Year Health Plan leans heavily on artificial intelligence to lighten the load, and there are early signs it can. Ambient Voice Technology — tools that listen to a consultation and draft the notes — is already cutting documentation time for some GPs. A separate Nuffield Trust and RCGP study found that 28% of UK GPs are now using AI in their clinical work.

But I would urge caution about the framing, and so does the College. GP feedback on these tools is mixed. There is no settled regulatory framework yet, no agreed national guidance on liability or governance, and the evidence base is still thin. And there is a subtler trap. Even where AI does save time, that time does not automatically turn into more appointments. The Nuffield Trust’s own conclusion was that much of it will go towards reducing the overtime and burnout GPs are currently soaking up — which is a good thing, but a different thing from “more capacity”.

The Same Picture in Ireland

I read this report from Dublin, and almost every theme in it maps onto general practice here — even though the specifics are English, and the College is careful to say health policy is devolved.

Start with the workforce, because it is the backdrop to everything else. The ICGP’s own benchmark is around twelve GPs per 10,000 people; Ireland has roughly seven. Irish general practice handles something in the order of 29 million consultations a year, and the projected shortfall is stark — research published in 2025 points to a deficit of between 1,260 and 1,660 GPs by 2028, with rural and urban-deprived areas hit hardest. The ESRI expects the number of GP visits to climb by 23 to 30 per cent between 2023 and 2040 as the population grows and ages.

Now layer the admin on top. The same body of Irish research describes GPs routinely working ten-hour days, with growing administrative burden pulling time away from patients — the exact pattern the RCGP has just costed in England. The difference is that nobody has put a euro figure on Ireland’s hidden workload the way the RCGP has put £410 on England’s. We do not have the equivalent number. My strong suspicion is that if someone ran the same time-and-motion study here, it would not look any prettier.

Where Ireland Is Ahead, and Where It Isn’t

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting for anyone thinking about technology, because Ireland already has pieces of the puzzle the RCGP is asking England to build.

Healthlink and Healthmail — the national clinical messaging broker and secure clinical email service — already take a chunk out of the administrative load by moving results, referrals and correspondence around electronically. They are not glamorous, but they work, and the Irish research suggests they genuinely reduce admin and support more patient-centred care.

What Ireland still lacks is the big one: a unified, shared electronic health record that follows the patient across GP, hospital and community care. That is precisely what the Digital for Care 2030 framework and the new HSE App are meant to deliver, and it is the same gap English GPs are pointing at when 73 per cent of them say they want an integrated shared record. Get interoperability right and a lot of the rekeying, the chasing and the bounce-backs simply stop being necessary.

What Actually Needs to Happen

The report makes 15 recommendations. I will not list them all — you can read them in the original — but they cluster into a handful of sensible asks that travel well across both health systems.

If there is a single thread tying these together, it is this: do not chase efficiency in a way that simply shovels the work back onto GPs.

The Honest Reading

I am a technologist by trade, so I will happily make the case that better systems can transform general practice, and this report hands me plenty of ammunition for it. But the honest reading is that technology is an enabler, not a rescue. The £410 a day is not mostly a software bug. It is the symptom of a system that has quietly pushed its inefficiencies onto its most stretched workers, and no amount of clever automation fixes that on its own. That is as true in Dublin as it is in London.

The encouraging part is that so much of this is within reach. Cleaner data flows, fewer pointless forms, AI used honestly and evaluated properly, and funding that reflects the real job. None of it is science fiction. What is needed now is for the people who design the system to act on what GPs have been telling them for years. The evidence is finally on the table. The only question, as ever, is whether anyone moves.