rewrite this title NHS Losing Millions of Hours to Employee Experience Friction, Apogee Finds – UC Today

A new report from Apogee reveals that routine workplace friction in NHS organizations is silently eroding frontline capacity, with the system losing the equivalent of more than 35 million staff hours each year.

Drawn from Freedom of Information responses across NHS trusts in the UK, the report states that those lost hours translate into over £1 billion in unrealized productivity, roughly enough to fund around 20,000 full-time NHS roles or more than 40 million patient appointments.

“We often talk about productivity in the NHS in terms of large-scale transformation programs, but our research shows that a significant amount of time is still being lost in the small, everyday moments of friction that happen thousands of times a day,”

James Clark, CEO at Apogee, said.

Rather than stemming from a lack of digital tools, the losses are rooted in how existing systems sit alongside paper-based habits and fragmented workflows. The report, “Time Back. Care Forward,” frames the issue as one of friction, the tiny interruptions staff experience thousands of times a day, and argues that untangling these can unlock time that would otherwise be trapped in administration.

Everyday Friction Creating Issues

At the heart of the research is the finding that NHS staff lose an average of eight minutes per day just getting to work, moving information, and communicating with patients.

Over an entire year, that adds up to roughly 35 hours per person, almost the equivalent of one full week of working time. When scaled across the workforce, this balloons to the 35-plus million hours cited in the report.

The first friction point, “getting staff to work,” captures the time lost at the start of shifts while staff wait to log in and access devices.

On average, staff wait more than 80 seconds to reach a usable desktop, with some delays stretching to six minutes or more, all before a single patient is seen. Multiply that by thousands of login events each day, and the cumulative impact on capacity becomes clear, even though each individual delay feels trivial.

The second area, “moving information,” exposes how digitization has not always meant simplification. Despite the rollout of electronic systems, many trusts still print more than 1.1 billion pages annually, effectively copying paper workflows into PDF form and creating redundant steps, duplication, and added administrative load. This hybrid approach fragments the journey of information and forces staff to switch between digital and physical media, often within the same task.

The third friction point, “reaching patients,” centers on communication gaps. The report estimates that around five million appointments are missed each year, without a granular view of how many are linked to poor communication, missed reminders, or unclear instructions.

At the same time, Apogee’s analysis shows that many trusts lack the telemetry to measure how long key processes take, making it hard to pinpoint where delays occur and which interventions would have the most impact.

How This Effects NHS Employees

The findings come into sharp relief when set against NHS England’s Frontline Digitization Programme, which aims to move the service from paper-based, analog processes to a fully digital, interoperable foundation. The program has driven a multi-billion-pound push to deploy or upgrade electronic patient records (EPRs) and ensure that trusts reach a baseline level of digital capability.

However, the Apogee report suggests that digitizing records alone does not automatically produce smoother workflows or a better employee experience.

In practice, digital-first investments can improve at least one element of the employee experience: document retrieval. Staff can quickly pull up electronic records. But if logging in, moving attachments, chasing signatures, or coordinating with colleagues across multiple channels remains slow and clunky, the overall gain in efficiency is limited.

“What’s striking is that this isn’t about a lack of technology. In most cases, systems are already in place, but they don’t work together effectively,” Clark said.

“Organizations have digitized processes, but not always simplified them. Paper became PDF, but the underlying inefficiencies remain.”

What the study underscores is that technology-led transformation must be paired with process-led redesign; otherwise, improvements are localized rather than systemic.

Moreover, the “productivity gap” created by small frictions undermines the rationale behind the 10-Year Health Plan’s 2% productivity target. Policymakers are increasingly looking to digital tools and AI-driven automation to claw back time and offset workforce shortages, yet those gains can be partially offset if basic workflows remain bottlenecked by avoidable delays.

For trusts already under pressure, that means even successful EPR rollouts may not translate into visible improvements on the shop floor if login friction, document handling, and communication pathways have not been redesigned around clinical workflows.

From a staff experience perspective, the report also hints at broader implications for burnout and morale. When clinicians spend meaningful portions of their shifts wrestling with broken or fragmented systems, they are less able to focus on direct care. This can erode job satisfaction and reinforce perceptions that digitization is another layer of bureaucracy rather than a genuine enabler.

From Friction to Frontline Capacity

Apogee’s research shows that the issue is not always about technology, but how employees experience it.

The report argues that returning time to care depends less on procuring new systems and more on optimizing how existing devices, information, and communication channels are connected so staff can move seamlessly from one task to the next.

One of the report’s central messages is that even modest reductions in friction can yield substantial returns. It estimates that cutting everyday delays by just 25% could free up around £250 million in staff time each year, effectively creating a partial “virtual workforce” without needing to recruit or train additional staff.

For a system under mounting pressure, making thousands of small process improvements could result in a tangible uplift in frontline capacity.