43 minutes per staff member per day
This latest NHS press release is a good example of how organisations are trying to quantify time savings from investment in AI. In this case: “Major NHS AI trial delivers unprecedented time and cost savings …Microsoft 365 Copilot trial demonstrates monthly time savings of potentially 400,000 hours for NHS staff.”
That 400,000 hours of staff time breaks down to: “AI-powered administrative support [which] could save NHS staff on average 43 minutes per staff member per day or more […] 5 weeks of time per person annually.
I feel like I hear these types of numbers being shared every week… Whether it’s 27 or 43 minutes, which equate to hundreds of thousands of hours that could be saved each year. But it’s how these numbers are then translated that I find most interesting:
“The NHS estimates that the technology could save it millions of pounds every month based on 100,000 users, which could reach hundreds of millions of pounds in cost savings every year – cost savings that would be spent on directly improving patient care and frontline services.”
Alongside the need for cost savings and the challenges of meeting increasing demand, it’s this last part which is obviously the most important. The question is whether spare time released really translates into frontline care. Or, does it actually provide capacity that’s consumed by more admin?
I still think this is a bigger question of reimagining work with technology. I wrote about this earlier this year, how what’s often being described as improving productivity is stuck in applying new technologies to inefficient processes (and the need for service design).
Some useful details demonstrate this point if we look more closely at this particular press release:
“Currently, over one million online Teams meetings take place across the NHS each month. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, 83,333 hours in note-taking time could be saved every month.”
I suspect we now have more meetings than ever as a result of shifts in ways of working during the pandemic years. But have we stopped long enough to ask how useful or productive most of these meetings are? Adding more technology further embeds a reliance on them.
New uses of automation also change the dynamics and usefulness of how people meet. As I’ve explored before, not all admin should be automated, with useful research and insights into this being shared in areas like social care.
“The AI personal assistant could also save the health service 271,000 hours a month by summarising complex and long email chains for clinicians and staff. More than 10.3 million emails are sent in the NHS each month.”
Is this simply automating an email culture – where there’s a lack of focus on alternative workflows, governance and convening points for decision-making? Why the long, complex email chain in the first place? Where are the new patterns for operating in robust, but more collaborative, flexible ways outside of traditional business management?
And finally, back to the point about cost savings and improved patient care:
“Reducing the administrative burden on NHS staff frees up valuable time that can be redirected towards patient care and clinical activities as the health service undergoes the largest digital transformation in its history.”
No one disagrees with the need to reduce administrative burden. Or the need to make better use of technology. These are good intentions and goals. But there’s less compelling proof that this is happening when you spend any time in the NHS (everyone has their own personal stories – here is one of my own health system stories from last year).
Some of this tooling (LLMs and equivalents to Copilot) have already been in use for at least 12-18 months in many public sector organisations. It feels like we’re automating more notes from more Teams calls, supported by more email summaries, that encourage more back and forth between professionals who don’t have a better means of working effectively as part of complex settings.
To be clear, I do believe AI and technology is a big part of transforming the NHS and other parts of the public sector – as I’ve said, we need to find new spaces where possibility and optimism in technology can remain alive. But that also means we need to shape better use cases than AI-enabled meetings and email, with a better re-imagining of how technology can support work effectively in our systems.
As these types of press releases keep saying, there are potentially savings of hundreds of millions of pounds every year. We can increase the chances of success and remove the ambiguity in that statement by switching our focus.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.