In the election campaign earlier this summer, all parties promised to reform the NHS. In its manifesto, the new Labour government has pledged to get the “NHS back on its feet”, with bold plans to reduce waiting times, increase appointment availability, and train thousands more GPs. While these commitments are commendable, they fall short of addressing the root issues. Over 6 million patients are currently on NHS waiting lists – a number comparable to the entire population of Denmark. To ensure the NHS’s long-term sustainability, we need more than just incremental improvements; we need transformative changes to our delivery models and the way we provide care.
It’s no secret that the current NHS care model is plagued by inefficiencies. Silos make communication difficult, staffing shortages exacerbate capacity pressures, care is too often reactive rather than preventative, and administrative burdens swallow clinicians’ time. Research suggests clinicians are spending more than a third of their working hours on documentation. It’s no surprise that clinician burnout is on the rise, with overstretched staff taking on additional hours to fill staffing gaps, fuelling a vicious cycle.
The NHS is grappling with a growing supply-demand mismatch so severe that adding more clinicians risks simply maintaining the same level of dysfunction. Labour’s plans to increase GP numbers and incentivise staff to facilitate over 40,000 additional appointments a week is important, but insufficient on its own.
As long as demand for NHS services continues to outpace supply, resources will remain strained, leading to prolonged waits and overburdened staff. The only viable long-term solution is to rethink care delivery to enhance operational efficiency, triage and treat patients more effectively, free up appointments, and better support clinical teams.
This challenge may seem daunting. The NHS machine has been whirring since 1948 and it sees roughly 1.3m patients daily. However, we can implement change incrementally, starting by introducing new parallel care pathways for the conditions currently having the biggest negative impact on long-term population health, like mental and musculoskeletal (MSK) health.
To give a sense of scale, there are currently around 340,000 patients on waiting lists for community MSK services alone in England. MSK problems account for a third of GP appointments and 30 million lost work days annually. Often, by the time patients access MSK physiotherapy, their condition has either resolved or worsened so significantly that it fuels workplace absence and a vicious cycle of deterioration. Faster and more scalable triage and treatment of these patients could facilitate their recovery within the community, reducing the need for long-term care.
Designing New Delivery Models
At Flok Health, we’ve already demonstrated how innovative care delivery models can alleviate pressure points in the MSK treatment pathway. We’ve developed the UK’s first autonomous physiotherapy clinic, capable of managing MSK patients from initial presentation, or self-referral, and triage, through to treatment delivery and discharge on behalf of their Trusts, with radically less dependence on human intervention.
Our novel system uses AI to offer patients personalised, same-day clinical treatment at population scale via their smartphone, in a setting which feels like a structured video call with a world-class physiotherapist. Our guiding principle is that the vast majority of MSK patients do better if they have fast access to frequent multidisciplinary care, something that requires new delivery models to be possible at the required scale. This approach could free up critical clinical capacity in primary, community, and secondary care for complex or unsuitable cases, while enabling thousands of patients who do not need urgent specialist intervention to start physiotherapy immediately.
In recent NHS service evaluations, 100% of patients said their experience with our AI physiotherapist had been “better” or “the same as” what they’d expect from a human physiotherapist. More than four in five patients (86%) reported that their symptoms had improved during treatment with Flok.
And we know that new care pathways like ours can significantly reduce waiting lists. Data from a trial at Cambridge University Hospitals indicated that wait lists for in-person musculoskeletal appointments increased by more than 50% once the Flok pilot had ended and the AI clinic was no longer in use. Simply allocating more money, clinicians, and appointments alone will not yield such results, we also need to allocate these resources more efficiently and make the most of limited clinician time.
AI-driven Pathways in the NHS
There is hope for the NHS under our new government. Labour has already made their ambition clear to make the UK a globally important player in AI, and our healthcare system is one of the most powerful verticals where we can do this. New care delivery models can not only optimise resource allocation and reduce the burden on clinicians, but also ensure that patients receive timely and effective care the moment they need it. The right intervention at the right time can transform long-term health outcomes; and the right technology can make this a reality at population scale. Powerful, responsibly produced and procured technology can help the NHS maintain a quality and consistency of care almost impossible for humans to deliver alone, whilst freeing up clinical capacity and reducing waits. We often talk about getting the NHS back on its feet, I hope we go beyond that, and take the necessary steps towards becoming the healthcare system that we need for the future – an NHS that is better than ever.
By Finn Stevenson, CEO and co-founder at Flok Health
