New NHS online hospital will not create extra workload for GPs, says trust director

The new ‘online hospital’ patients can be referred to from next year will not create more workload for general practice, and GPs will be consulted on its referral pathways, one of the trust’s directors has said.

NHS Online non-executive director Omar Din, who is a former Operose Health CEO, said that the new trust is ‘not going to create more work’, and that the approach to create the referral pathways will gather feedback from GPs.

The new trust, which has now been established and will launch in 2027, 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.

It was first announced last year and will be chaired by retail executive John Browett. Its non-executive directors include Mr Din and Dr Nikki Kanani, former national medical director for primary care at NHS England.

Mr Din said that the NHS App will allow patients referred to the online trust to see where they are ‘in that journey on the referral route’ and know ‘exactly when’ they are going to be seen and by which clinician, meaning that fewer patients will contract GP practices to chase information about referrals.

Speaking at panel discussion at NHS Confed Expo in Manchester, Mr Din said: ‘We’re not going to solve all of the demand and capacity problems through NHS Online, but it’s going to really shift the needle on wait lists.

‘I want to talk a little bit about reducing workload, and one of my commitments as a non-executive director for NHS Online is that we do not create more workload for anybody in our system.

‘We’re not creating more work, we’re making life easier for our clinicians, we’re making choices better for our patients, and we’re making the throughput and the speed of access much better. It’s not going to create more work, and we’ll make sure that that is the case.’

He added that using the NHS App for referrals to the online trust will ‘shift patients from contacting us and taking up our time in general practice’ which is ‘avoidable’.

He said: ‘Today when a patient’s on a wait list waiting to be seen by a consultant or a particular trust or other place, they’re quite anxious, and very often they contact us [in general practice] to say “what’s going on with my referral”, and that takes very significant capacity.

‘That comes to us in general practice, a chase-up or “Where am I in this process? What’s happened to my results?”, that kind of thing.’

‘Now that’s going to be managed through the NHS App. And that’s a really, really important intervention that we shouldn’t overlook, particularly for our colleagues in general practice. It’s an important one.

‘So you will now be able to see where you are in that journey on the referral route, you know exactly when you’re going to be seen, who you’re going to be seen by.’

On getting GPs’ views for the referrals pathways, Mr Din said: ‘We’re doing a lot of engagement, and that starts with both sides, patients and clinicians in primary care. There’s two of us on the non-executive board who are from primary care, myself and Nikki [Kanani], who was previously a director for NHS England.

‘We’re very much steeped in primary care, and we will be coming out, talking to our colleagues nationally to really get their views, to engage them very, very early on, to understand what’s going to work, what’s not going to work, what are their fears, what are the things that are aspirational from their perspective as well, and we’ll start from that perspective.’

According to 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’.