Automation in Primary Care

In line with the NHS 2023 Workforce Plan, IGPF is committed to supporting practices with streamlined working and automation to take advantage of digital and technological innovations.

Automation provides a great opportunity to reduce the burden on staff in primary care. We support both clinical and administrative staff to minimise repetitive tasks, improve working experience, and nurture innovation. By designing systems that are safe and reliable, we can build best-practice processes that can be shared within teams to build resilience and across neighbouring practices to share learning.

We already use automation tools to process patient registrations, support long-term condition recall, monitor high-risk medications, and manage drug and device alerts. We are also exploring automation for document filing.

In addition, we are hosting an NHS-funded pilot using AI to boost cervical screening uptake, pioneering new ways to engage patients and improve preventative care. Separately, we are developing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to streamline routine referral processing for our community Gynaecology and ENT services. This RPA will handle standardised first-time referrals, significantly reducing administrative workload, increasing efficiency, and freeing staff to focus on more complex tasks and direct patient care.

We share the NHS vision of freeing up staff to focus their time on providing the best quality of care to patients while continuously improving our services.