20 July 2026
Freedom of Information find another 28% of NHS Trusts could not say how many IT outages they had.
20 July 2026, London: Apogee reveals that 85% of NHS trusts do not proactively monitor the digital experience of frontline staff, leaving many without a clear understanding of how technology is performing or where every day IT issues are impacting patient care.
The findings point to a wider operational visibility challenge across the NHS. 40% of NHS trusts could not confirm the total duration of clinically significant IT outages, while a further 28% were unable to say how many IT outages they had experienced during the reporting period. While trusts generate vast amounts of technology and operational data, many cannot consistently measure where delays occur or how technology issues affect frontline workflows.
Trusts that were able to provide data reported more than 1.1 million device-related incidents in a single year — an average of more than 9,000 per trust — alongside over 360,000 IT-related incidents. Responding trusts also recorded more than 13,000 cumulative hours of downtime, with average incident resolution times exceeding 48 hours.
Three key visibility gaps emerged across the research:
- Access to technology: 67% of trusts could not say how long it typically takes staff to access their systems, while 59% did not know how many employees have access to a designated workstation.
- Information flow: Despite continued digitisation, 44% of trusts could not report how many pages were scanned into electronic patient record systems. 41% were unable to confirm how many outpatient communications had been issued via post or hybrid mail.
- Patient communication: Trusts reported around five million missed or unattended appointments during the same period. However, fewer than 5% could say if these were caused by communication failures, and 19% could not confirm the number of missed appointments at all.
“The debate about technology in the NHS often focuses on which systems trusts should buy next, but our data shows a more basic problem: many trusts do not know how well current systems are working for staff each day.
James Clark, CEO, Apogee.“You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Right now, many trusts have limited insight into basic indicators like access times, outage impact, and patient communication failures. This makes it incredibly difficult to improve workflows, prioritise investment or demonstrate the value of digital transformation.
“Before adding new tools or looking at how AI can help, trusts need a clearer view of how work happens today. Better operational visibility gives NHS IT teams the evidence they need to remove friction, improve reliability and make better-informed decisions about future investment.”
At Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals, working with Apogee, improvements to how information was accessed and managed across systems helped reduce inefficiencies in day-to-day workflows.
By simplifying processes and improving how data moved between teams, the trust reduced duplication and improved operational flow, releasing time back into frontline activity. Read the full case study here. Apogee's Time Back, Care Forward report provides a practical plan for NHS trusts: identify where time is lost, eliminate unnecessary steps and delays, and redirect recovered time to patient care.
About Apogee
Apogee works with 47 NHS Trusts across the UK, supporting digital transformation, document management and workplace efficiency programmes at scale. Its work with organisations including The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust, Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals, Northumbria Healthcare, Barts Health, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ demonstrates a strong track record in modernising legacy systems, improving information governance, and delivering measurable productivity gains.
Its approach is built around improving the modern workplace as a connected environment — bringing together end-user devices, managed print, document services, records digitisation, inbound and outbound communications, and workflow automation into a single operating model.
Methodology
The findings are based on data from two Freedom of Information (FOI) requests submitted to 203 NHS trusts across the UK between January and March 2026, resulting in 244 responses.
To calculate our headline statistics this estimate combines NHS workforce data, FOI responses from NHS trusts, and conservative assumptions about everyday inefficiencies across the working day. Using NHS Digital workforce figures, a subset of 1.2 million patient-facing and administrative staff is modelled. FOI data on login times and document handling is used to estimate time lost to access delays (around 3.75 minutes per day) and inefficient document workflows (around 1 minute), with a further conservative allowance of 3 minutes to reflect broader system friction such as slow applications and interruptions. This produces an estimated total of eight minutes lost per staff member per day. Scaled across 220 working days, this equates to approximately 35.2 million hours of lost time annually. Applying a blended hourly cost of £30 — based on NHS earnings data and standard overhead assumptions — results in an estimated £1.06 billion in lost productivity each year. The approach is intentionally conservative, grounding assumptions in published data and FOI responses to provide a credible view of the scale of time lost to everyday operational friction across NHS Trusts. A full breakdown of how this figure was calculated can be found in the Appendix of the report.
