GP internet issues 'totally unacceptable in 2026'

An ongoing and "deeply frustrating" IT issue affecting GPs is unacceptable, a doctors group has said.

Surgeries in south-east England are intermittently struggling to connect to the internet and have been reporting issues for some time.

Dr Jack Jacobs, a medical director at the Kent Local Medical Committee, said it was "totally ridiculous" and "totally unacceptable in 2026".

NHS Kent and Medway said the separate department that provided IT for GPs in the county was investigating the outage.

The organisation asked patients to "bear with practice staff who are doing their best" and said surgeries were open as normal despite the tech problems.

Jacobs, of Hamstreet Surgery, said: "It's been very difficult for our staff because these issues are intermittent, they're unpredictable."

Sometimes an outage can affect all of a practice's systems and the issues can last from five minutes to almost a whole day, according to the doctor.

He said GPs had been experiencing the problems since January, every surgery in Kent had been impacted and "patients have been significantly affected by it".

"If the IT goes down that is everything," he told BBC Radio Kent.

"The online requests, we can't see them; the prescription requests, we can't process them; the appointments, we can't access; the notes, we can't see."

During one appointment amid an outage Jacobs said he had to look at the NHS app on his patient's phone to gain access to their notes.

He said: "When I turn my computers on at work I don't know if they're going to work and I think every GP in Kent and Medway slightly dreads that moment.

"People are working hard at trying to fix it but it appears to be getting worse at the moment, which is incredibly frustrating.

"I do think there is a risk of patient harm occurring because of this happening."

NHS Kent and Medway said the issue was not just impacting that area.

NHS Surrey and Sussex also confirmed on Tuesday that practices in its counties were affected and that technical teams were "working urgently to resolve issues".

More than a million people a month in the South East get in touch with their GP online, according to the latest figures.

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