It’s a familiar moment in general practice. A clinician is mid-consultation, waiting for a form to load, a record to open, a referral to submit. The cursor spins. Whatever’s on screen at that moment tends to get the blame.
It’s an understandable instinct. But it’s often the wrong diagnosis.
The Royal College of GPs addressed this directly in its April 2026 report, Tackling the GP workload crisis. It found that fragmented technology across the NHS is creating hidden, avoidable work for GPs – practices navigating poorly integrated systems, chasing information between services, absorbing administrative burden that has little to do with direct patient care.
Professor Victoria Tzortziou Brown, Chair of the RCGP, highlighted the same problem: GPs are increasingly being asked to pick up work generated by system inefficiencies elsewhere, including navigating fragmented IT systems – work that reduces the time available for the care patients actually need.
This matters because it reframes the everyday frustration of “the system is slow” as something bigger than any single piece of software. It’s a symptom of a wider infrastructure picture that many conversations about digital healthcare skip past.
Part of the answer lies in where NHS technology funding has historically gone.
Speaking at Digital Health Rewired in March 2026, NHS England’s chief clinical information officer (CCIO), Alec Price-Forbes, was candid about this. For the last 10 to 15 years, he said, the NHS has focused relentlessly on directing around 95% of technology funding into hospitals. He confirmed that future funding would need to shift towards non-acute and community settings.
That’s a significant admission from within NHS England itself, and a welcome signal of intent. But intent and delivery are different things, and general practice has spent over a decade operating with a smaller share of the investment that hospitals have received, even as expectations for digital working in primary care have risen sharply.
Infrastructure isn’t just a funding question – it’s a geography one too.
Every GP practice’s setup is slightly different: different broadband providers, different network configurations, different distances from the nearest exchange. A practice on a fast, modern connection in a town centre and a practice in a rural area on a patchy, inconsistent line are being asked to run the same systems and meet the same expectations, despite starting from very different technical foundations.
This isn’t a hypothetical concern. An editorial published in the British Journal of General Practice in July 2026 argued that NHS digital policy needs to be “rural-proofed” – recognising that infrastructure, workforce and access constraints vary by geography, and that policies designed around urban assumptions risk leaving rural practices structurally disadvantaged.
None of this is a sudden discovery. The Royal College of GPs’ own national polling, published in October 2024, found that 26% of GPs reported that their work PC or laptop hardware was not fit for purpose, and 56% said their digital infrastructure was so inadequate they couldn’t effectively exchange information with NHS trusts.
That data is now nearly two years old, and it should be read with that caveat in mind – practices and infrastructure do change over time, and it would be wrong to treat a 2024 snapshot as a precise description of today.
But taken alongside the RCGP’s more recent 2026 findings on fragmented IT and hidden workload, the underlying concerns clearly remain.
None of this is to say that software is never the cause of a slow-running system. It sometimes is, and when it is, that’s a problem worth fixing directly and quickly.
But when a form is slow to load, or a system feels sluggish, the fair and useful question isn’t “why is this software slow?” It’s “where in the chain is this actually happening?”
Is it the hardware the clinician is working from? The practice’s network? The clinical system underneath? Or the software itself?
Each of those has a different fix, and treating every slow moment as a software problem means the real cause – often sitting one or two layers beneath what’s on screen – rarely gets addressed.
Getting this right matters for reasons well beyond frustration in the moment. The NHS’s ambition for digital-by-default care, joined-up referrals and reduced administrative burden all depend on infrastructure that can actually support them.
A brilliant piece of software running on hardware that takes minutes to respond, or over a connection that can’t reliably sustain it, will never deliver what it’s capable of.
Closing that gap isn’t simply a technology question. It’s a precondition for the kind of efficient, connected care the whole sector is trying to build.
If infrastructure challenges are affecting how your team works day to day, we’d welcome the conversation. Get in touch – hello@dxs-systems.co.uk
