Workforce shortages and growing administrative pressure are placing increasing strain on the NHS, prompting managers to look for practical ways to support overstretched clinicians.
According to NHS England, November 2025 saw the second biggest drop in the waiting list for 15 years outside of the early days of the pandemic. Even so, the data revealed that there are some 7.31 million planned treatments still in the pipeline as staff continue to face record demand for health services.
With such a backlog of cases, you’d expect the narrative to focus on how to use technology to reduce waiting lists. But it’s also true that people are starting to broaden the discussion to include not just how AI can be used to improve clinical outcomes and tackle administration but also to improve staff wellbeing.
After all, behind every patient is a complex web of administration to coordinate appointments and treatments. Documentation, referral letters, reporting and scheduling can eat into people’s personal time in the evenings and weekends, contributing to fatigue and burnout across the workforce.
And yet, recent trials suggest that targeted AI tools designed to remove paperwork from the clinical workflow could make a meaningful difference.
Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has just completed a trial using ambient voice technology (AVT), AI-powered software that listens to consultations in real time and automatically turns speech into structured clinical notes, letters and records, reducing the need for clinicians to type up documentation after appointments.
And it found that these voice-enabled AI tools helped clinicians save nearly 30 minutes a day, cutting admin time and reducing staff pressure.
AI is relieving pressure on the frontline
Even before the project started, two-thirds (66%) of staff said they expected AVT to make a difference. By the end of the trial, three-quarters (73%) said they had experienced improvements in their wellbeing.
Staff described how the technology led to less exhaustion and fewer headaches. Others reported how they were able to finish admin within clinics, which meant not working weekends to complete letters.
One specialist nurse quoted in the report said: “Not having the burden of extra paperwork has improved my wellbeing and job satisfaction. Losing AVT would feel like a step backwards.”
While one consultant said: “The main benefit is reducing stress. After a clinic, if I can’t do the administration and report writing soon after, it becomes much harder to remember details. With AVT, I had all my clinic letters done quickly, which transformed a potentially overwhelming week into something manageable.”
Patients also benefitted, with 81.8% of clinicians agreeing that AVT increased face-to-face time and reduced computer use during clinical encounters.
All too often, the headline-grabbing stories around AI in healthcare tend to focus on clinical breakthroughs, earlier diagnosis and the promise of personalised medicine. Those advances are important. But they are not the issue that is placing the greatest strain on today’s health systems.
This is why the role of AI in healthcare needs to be reframed. Rather than being seen primarily as a tool for innovation, efficiency or clinical excellence, it should be considered in terms of the impact it makes on the staff themselves.
Growing support for practical AI tools
This is particularly relevant for a workforce that is already stretched. Research from the Health Foundation found that 81% of NHS staff support the use of AI for administrative tasks such as drafting letters, scheduling appointments and managing routine documentation. In fact, support for AI in these operational areas is even stronger than support for its use in direct patient care.
This should not come as a surprise. Clinicians are not asking for more dashboards or abstract initiatives. What they want are practical tools that remove friction from the working day.
And there is growing evidence that this kind of administrative support can deliver meaningful results at scale. Another high-profile trial involving more than 30,000 NHS workers across 90 organisations found that AI-powered tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot could save staff an average of 43 minutes per day by automating routine administrative work.
Much of the debate around this trial focused on how a full roll-out could “save up to 400,000 hours of staff time per month, equating to millions of hours every year, enabling staff to focus more effectively on frontline care.” The wellbeing message was not quite so prominent.
Looking ahead, AI agents could further reduce the administrative load across clinical documentation, scheduling, patient logistics and operational coordination. By coordinating administrative workflows across multiple systems – rather than simply generating documents – these tools could automatically schedule appointments, update patient records and trigger follow-up actions.
Such a move would free up clinicians to practise at the top of their licence, allowing them to focus on diagnosis, treatment and patient interaction rather than paperwork.
And that has implications beyond productivity. As health systems compete for scarce clinical talent, digitally enabled working environments will become part of the employment proposition.
Organisations that reduce administrative friction and support staff with practical AI tools will offer a more sustainable place to practise than those that continue to rely on manual processes. Over time, that difference will influence recruitment and retention.
By Esteban Gebhard, European MD, Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) at Globant