Billions Spent, But NHS Doctors Still Work on Pen and Paper
My Cousin’s Voice Note is a Wake Up Call to the NHS
Just ridiculous.
7:39am. My phones buzzes.
A voice note from my cousin, who’s just moved hospitals working as a doctor in the NHS.
He begins: “I’m not usually the one to get stressed, but Wednesday and Thursday last week were probably the two most stressful days I’ve had in a long time.”
As he explained why, I was shocked. Not because being a doctor is tough — we all know it is — but because of the reason behind his stress…
Chaos
He’d just finished induction and was sent straight to a cardiology ward. No one had explained where to go, or even whether he was meant to start work that day. Suddenly, he was covering new patients coming into the cardiac unit, still trying to figure out how to log into the systems.
“I can’t do the basics — requesting scans, checking blood results, prescribing medication. It all takes ages. And meanwhile there’s pressure from bed managers and nurses to get patients discharged. New patients are coming in, others are unwell… mate, it was absolute chaos.”
And then he joked as he said it, but the reality behind his words couldn’t be more serious:
“Because at the end of it all, there’s someone’s life at the end of it.”
Handwriting Drug Charts in 2025
“There’s paper drug charts here, which is actually just insane. This hospital literally looks like a private hospital, but you’re still handwriting the drugs. They’re going to phase it out next month — but right now everything’s just so slow.”
He described the absurdity of writing out medications by hand for every patient:
“I know this might sound like a first-world problem, but I can’t tell you how backwards and old-school that is, especially with the amount of patients we have on the wards nowadays. That’s insane, in this day and age, to be handwriting drug charts.”
This is just risk. One missed entry, one illegible word, and patient safety is on the line.
A System That Doesn’t Speak to Itself
What makes it worse is the inconsistency. Different hospitals, even in the same city, run on different IT systems. They don’t talk to each other. Doctors have to relearn the basics every time they move.
“Every trust has its own systems, its own paperwork, its own way of doing things. They don’t really speak the same language. From an IT technology point of view, it’s a bad situation.”
Billions, But Broken
And this is what frustrates me most.
The NHS is publicly funded. Billions are poured into it every year.
Politicians boast about record spending.
Yet the people on the frontline — the very doctors keeping patients alive — are forced to waste time with outdated, fragmented, unintuitive and inefficient systems.
My cousin summed it up in one anxious reflection:
“When you’re going home you’re thinking, have I forgotten to prescribe this crucial medication? Because it’s all on paper. It’s constantly in your conscience.”
Enough
Forget the hype about AI.
Forget flashy pilot projects.
The NHS and politicians don’t need to chase futuristic headlines when it can’t even get the basics right.
It needs one standard system across trusts. It needs electronic prescribing everywhere. It needs IT that is fast, safe, and reliable.
Until that happens, billions will keep being spent, staff will keep breaking, and patients will keep paying the price.
We’re building a house on sand — and are wondering why it keeps collapsing.