The NHS will use AI inside its app to direct patients in England to the right services, the government has announced. The tool will assess symptoms and work out whether someone needs a GP appointment, a pharmacy visit, or a trip to A&E.

The update is expected to reach 200,000 patients over the next year before becoming available to all users by April 2028. It forms part of a £10bn package to overhaul the health service’s technology and data systems.

Ending the so-called 8am scramble for same-day GP appointments was a central promise in Labour’s 2024 manifesto. The government said a trial at Wealden Ridge Medical Partnership in Sussex cut phone queues for GP appointments by 29%, a figure that has not yet been independently published.

Health secretary James Murray, who took the job in May, said he was “certain” the technology would get patients to the right care faster and drive down waiting times. The app move builds on earlier experiments, including OneAdvanced’s sovereign triage model trained on NHS primary-care data and Rapid Health’s Smart Triage, which already lets over a million patients book appointments through the app.

Notes without the note-taking

The package also covers ambient voice technology, which records consultations and drafts clinical notes to cut paperwork. An NHS trial led by Great Ormond Street Hospital across nine London sites found clinicians spent 23.5% more time interacting with patients, a figure officials rounded to 25% in the announcement.

The health service has been leaning into AI at scale for months. NHS England is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 505,000 staff, and startups such as Frontier Health are building AI agents for NHS admin teams.

The service has even approved an AI physiotherapist that treats patients unsupervised. The app announcement pushes that automation to the front door of the entire system.

Warnings to heed

Health leaders welcomed the investment but questioned the evidence behind it. Lynn Woolsey, chief nursing officer at the Royal College of Nursing, warned of “overstated, overly optimistic assessments” of AI’s productivity benefits, and said new systems must not create bureaucracy by producing flawed work that needs correcting.

She added that patients must be reassured that tools handling their information protect confidentiality. That anxiety lands amid wider scrutiny of NHS data deals, including the review of Palantir’s £330m data platform contract.

Tim Horton of the Health Foundation told the Guardian the plans need a broader long-term strategy for AI across the health system, warning of “piecemeal adoption” without one. NHS Alliance chief executive Ciarán Devane said local leaders need discretion over the money and clarity on what will be mandatory, cautioning that capital budgets have been raided for savings before.

Liability is a live question too, after a Medical Protection Society report in June warned that doctors and the NHS could be sued for mistakes made by AI tools. Pritesh Mistry, a fellow at the King’s Fund, said the real test is whether care feels more joined up, and that the NHS must ensure people are not digitally excluded as services lean on technology.

The 8am scramble may finally have a challenger. What matters now is what happens to the patients who never open the app.