Freedom of Information findings for Apogee have found that the NHS is losing 35 million staff hours and failing to carry out more than 40 million patient appointments a year.
The NHS is losing an estimated 35 million staff hours and failing to carry out more than 40 million patient appointments per year, thanks to the impact of “routine inefficiencies” making work “slower and more complex than it should be”.
These lead to huge problems for performance and productivity, despite NHS England now specifically measuring them. Research from Apogee has found that this adds up to£1 billion in lost productivity.
The workplace services provider’s report, Time Back, Care Forward, is based on the results of 244 Freedom of Information (FOI) responses. Apogee sent FOI requests to 203 NHS trusts across the UK between January and March this year.
According to the report, staff lose an average of eight minutes per day due to delays. Although minor on their own, when combined at scale, they create significant operational challenges.
The main causes of time lost are getting staff to work, with waits typically of over 80 seconds to access desktops; moving information, with more than 1.1 billion pages printed annually across responding trusts; and the communication issues of reaching patients.
Lacking visibility
Apogee’s findings also highlight the lack of visibility across NHS organisations. Many trusts can’t measure the duration of key processes or pinpoint where delays occur.
“We often talk about productivity in the NHS in terms of large-scale transformation programmes, but our research shows that a significant amount of time is still being lost in the small, everyday moments of friction that happen thousands of times a day,” said Apogee chief executive James Clark.
“What’s striking is that this isn’t about a lack of technology. In most cases, systems are already in place, but they don’t work together effectively. Organisations have digitised processes, but not always simplified them – paper became PDF, but the underlying inefficiencies remain,” he added.
He went on to say that the opportunity now for trusts is to focus on how work actually happens in practice: how staff access systems, how information flows, and how patients are reached.
The report offers a practical approach for NHS organisations, including the knowledge that simply reducing “everyday friction” by 25% could return approximately £250 million in staff time to frontline services each year.
It comes a year after research conducted elsewhere showed that 23% of adults have noticed inaccuracies or missing details in their NHS records.
