Faster broadband at GPs is pushing Brits onto video calls they don’t want
Key Points
- BDUK connected 252 rural GP surgeries to gigabit broadband under Project Gigabit
- Video consultations rose 3.4 percentage points and phone appointments fell 3.8 points
- Video appointments had 99.8% attendance against 97% to 98% for phone calls
- GPs interviewed said patients prefer phone or face-to-face and most have stopped offering video
- E-prescribing, online triage and cloud patient records were the services GPs said depend on the connection
A government scheme that connected 252 rural GP surgeries to gigabit broadband has moved patients from telephone appointments onto video calls, according to an evaluation by economics consultancy Belmana for Building Digital UK (BDUK).
The surgeries were connected through BDUK’s Rural Gigabit Connectivity programme and Project Gigabit, the government’s £5 billion plan to bring gigabit-capable broadband to the whole of the UK. Of the connected practices, 51 were in England, 94 in Scotland, 79 in Northern Ireland and 28 in Wales.
Belmana compared English surgeries that received the upgrade against similar rural practices that did not, using NHS England appointment data covering November 2022 to April 2025. Video consultations rose by 3.4 percentage points at connected surgeries, while telephone appointments fell by 3.8 percentage points.
The report found no significant change in face-to-face appointments or home visits, which means the video calls replaced phone calls rather than in-person care. The video increase held up in eight of the nine statistical models the researchers ran.
Patients were also more likely to turn up for a video appointment than a phone call. Attendance for video consultations ran at 99.8% to 99.9%, compared with 97.1% to 97.9% for telephone appointments, a gap the report described as consistent across every model tested.
Belmana put a rough value on the missed calls avoided, citing an NHS unit cost of £45 for a 10-minute GP consultation. The consultancy said a portion of that figure could stand as a proxy for each appointment that would have been missed on the phone but was kept on video.
The GPs interviewed for the report were far less enthusiastic about the format than the figures suggest.
“Patients don’t seem to want video consultations. They want a phone call, or they want to be seen face to face,” said a general practitioner in Somerset.
“You can’t examine the patient. You don’t get the same rapport. You can’t pick up on their body language,” said a general practitioner in Herefordshire.
The Herefordshire GP added that video calls were hard to fit into a busy clinic. “When you’re under a lot of time pressure, fiddling around trying to set up a video consultation is just not worth it,” she said.
Both doctors said their practices had all but abandoned video appointments since the pandemic ended. “We did a few in the pandemic and to be honest with you, we don’t do any now,” said the Herefordshire GP.
The report said the shift to video was probably a marker of surgeries adopting other digital tools rather than the main benefit of the upgrade.
Interviewees pointed to electronic prescribing, online triage through the Accurx messaging platform and the cloud-hosted EMIS patient record system as the services that depend on a reliable connection.
“EMIS is hosted remotely, which means if the Internet goes down, EMIS goes down,” said the Somerset GP. The Herefordshire GP said she signs around 90 prescriptions electronically every Tuesday and would see no patients at all if she had to write them by hand.
Belmana also found the upgrades enabled remote specialist advice for skin and heart conditions. The Somerset GP said photos of skin lesions sent to dermatologists in Bristol now get an answer within two weeks, replacing referrals that previously took up to a year.
In Oxfordshire, the county council paid to extend the fibre rollout beyond GP surgeries to village halls so the NHS could run clinics and groups closer to patients. A volunteer at one connected hall said NHS groups, including a mother and baby group, now hire the space regularly.
The report cautioned that broadband alone does not change how a surgery works. Belmana said the size of the effect depends on how digitally mature a practice already is, how many staff it has and whether its patients can use the technology.
The consultancy is due to publish a separate report on whether the investment delivered value for money.
