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.
