Health Online hospital service to be rolled out across England

Patients in England will be able to access care using an "online hospital" from 2027, Keir Starmer has said.

- Denis Campbell Jamie Grierson

The service, called NHS Online, aims to cut waiting lists and allow patients who have been referred to hospital by a GP to talk to a specialist by phone or video instead of going to a hospital appointment.

Experts immediately raised questions about whether the service would destabilise hospital-based services, who would staff it, its implications for patients' medical records and how it would affect people who were digitally excluded.

Labour said interacting digitally with hospital specialists would be more convenient for patients and ensure they were seen more quickly.

It will involve a massive expansion of the NHS app, which 38.5 million people have downloaded and more than 12 million a month use.

The service will help clinical teams to assess how urgent someone's illness is and will initially cover only a small number of health conditions.