New data shows NHS productivity for acute trusts increased by 2.7% over the past year - between April 2024 and March 2025 - exceeding the government’s 2% year-on-year target set in the 10 Year Health Plan.
According to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), this has been achieved through more same-day discharges, shorter hospital stays, better use of technology, reduced reliance on agency staff, improved staff retention, and sending in crack teams of top clinicians to underperforming trusts to drive rapid improvements.
Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting, said: "I’ve always been clear that NHS staff should be spending their time caring for patients, not on bureaucracy and needless duplication. We’re boosting productivity through a range of measures - from sending in crack teams to underperforming trusts, clamping down on wasteful agency spend and increasing use of technology. This is having a real-life impact for patients - quicker access to tests and treatment.
"We’re turning the NHS round after years of neglect but I know too many people are still waiting too long. That’s why we’re combining record investment of £29 billion with tough reforms, making sure every pound is spent on cutting waiting times and improving care for patients through our Plan for Change."
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, said: "Making the NHS more productive is essential to delivering better care for patients, value for money for the taxpayer and stronger economic growth. These are welcome figures that demonstrate our plan is working - but there is more we can do."
In a statement, DHSC said that productivity has been improved through a focus on efficiencies in elective care, outpatient reform and urgent and emergency care as well as on tech and artificial intelligence (AI). This includes the Further Faster 20 programme, a government initiative to deploy expert advice to NHS trusts in areas where more people are out of work - that helped cut waiting lists by 87,000 across 20 areas between October 2024 and June 2025.
More surgical hubs have also opened across the country, which provide the space to run surgeries back to back, so surgeons can treat more patients each shift.
The rollout of electronic prescribing and medicines administration (EPMA) systems has halved discharge medicine preparation times by using mobile devices rather than traditional paper-based systems to record medicine use. These systems will be in 98% of areas by March next year.
The DHSC also says that major investment in IT infrastructure, such as the electronic referral service (eRS) and the NHS App, is saving clinical time by allowing more care to be delivered more efficiently, remotely and in new care settings, as well as reducing missed appointments. With more patients able to access correspondence digitally through the app, almost 12 million fewer paper letters have been sent by hospitals between July 2024 and April 2025.
AI technology, tested across 9 NHS sites, has freed up clinicians to spend more time with patients. A&E departments saw a 13.4% increase in patients treated per shift and a 51.7% reduction in time spent completing documentation. This in turn will end the need for staff to carry out tasks like clinical note taking, letter drafting and manual data entry. When rolled out across the NHS, it could free up the equivalent of over 2,000 full-time GPs’ capacity.
Elizabeth O’Mahony, NHS Chief Financial Officer, said: "NHS teams across the country are laser-focused on delivering more for each taxpayer pound we spend, and these figures demonstrate the significant progress being made despite wider financial challenges.Reductions in agency spend, shorter hospital stays and better use of the latest medicines and technology are helping staff deliver care more efficiently for patients. Through the 10 Year Health Plan, the government will go even further to drive forward productivity."
