Government formally establishes ‘online hospital trust’ GPs can refer to from next year
An ‘online hospital trust’ GPs can refer patients to from next year has formally been established, the Government has announced.
NHS Online will give GPs the option to refer patients ‘to specialist clinicians across the country’ using the NHS App, for specific conditions including women’s health symptoms that point to endometriosis and fibroids, and prostate enlargement and raised PSA level.
The online hospital trust, which has now been established and was first announced by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last year, will be chaired by retail executive John Browett.
According to separate NHS England guidance, if specialist input is needed GP will be able to ‘offer NHS Online as a referral option’, but ‘only when it is suitable for the person and their condition’.
When NHS Online was first announced, GP leaders and health think tanks raised concerns the service would widen inequalities in access for patients by excluding patients lacking ‘digital literacy’.
The announcement came as part of further details about the Health Bill and the creation of a single patient record, which is set to be debated in Parliament today.
NHS Online will initially be available for ‘conditions where evidence shows digital care works well’ and where ‘current waiting times are long’, according to NHS England, including:
- Glaucoma, cataracts and medical retina conditions;
- Inflammatory bowel disease;
- Iron deficiency anaemia;
- Prostate conditions;
- Menopause and menstrual issues.
More conditions will be added over time, NHS England said, and only those ‘that can be safely managed partly or fully online’ will be included.
According to the guidance, NHS Online will use ‘existing national NHS systems’ including ‘the NHS App and NHS login’, and it said information would be ‘shared with the person’s GP in the usual way’.
The guidance also clarifies that any patient who ‘prefers face-to-face appointments will continue to use existing services as usual’.
DHSC has estimated NHS Online would deliver ‘the equivalent of up to 8.5 million appointments and assessments in its first three years’, or ‘four times more than an average trust’.
It said: ‘The NHS Modernisation Bill second reading comes on the day the chair of NHS’s groundbreaking new online hospital trust has been named.
‘NHS Online, which will provide virtual specialist care for patients through the NHS App and video consultations, has now been formally established as the Online NHS Trust with John Browett as the chairman.
‘Launching in 2027, NHS Online will be a new, optional online service allowing patients to digitally connect with clinicians across England. Doctors will be able to log in and help cut backlogs much more quickly and efficiently.’
A new NHS Online website will launch ‘in summer 2026’, with more details about how the service will work and how people can use it, NHSE said.
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READERS' COMMENTS [3]
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Umm… WHY ?
All patients currently reside in the catchment area of at least one existing hospital Trust already, don’t they?
How do the Consultants do the procedures on-line?
Do you have to poke your mobile phone inside?
While in dispute, the BMA should proactively recommend no GP refers to this scheme, so that it quickly becomes an embarrassing white elephant for this silly Govt.
It’s faulty, unfunded and not needed and it isn’t in the patient interest. The rosy claim DHSC make re 8.5 million appointments is (as philosopher Carissa Veliz writes in Prophecy) not fact but by definition mere prediction. And imo therefore hype, or a false claim.
NHS Online is a scam designed to get GPs and consultants to reduce their complex patient interactions into data points for a training dataset that will (in the near future) be scraped by a (private Big Tech) LLM.
Slag it off to your patients and let it fail from lack of GP interest and referrals.
Presumably they will ask us to do the tests then they will interpret them for us? Sounds like unfunded workload transfer.