NHS trusts still use fax machines daily despite phase-out pledge

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By Daniel Pye

There are three fax machines still in everyday use in the NHS, health secretary Wes Streeting has admitted.

This is despite a pledge he made in October 2024 to phase them out of the health service within a year.

The trusts still using fax machines are Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, and Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, Streeting told Matt Chorley on BBC Radio 5 Live.

He said Leeds and Birmingham have a plan to phase them out over the next 12 months but it’s going to take Shrewsbury and Telford “a bit longer”.

Streeting said he was told by the trusts he would cause them “some quite significant operational headaches” if he politically ordered them to stop using fax machines and they have “a good explanation” as to why they are still using them.

He added that while the machines do not see heavy use, they are used to communicate between departments and sites across those trusts.

More broadly many trusts still have fax machines in cupboards in case a cyber-attack happened, Streeting said.

In 2018, Conservative health secretary Matt Hancock banned the NHS from buying new faxes and ordered a complete phase-out by April 2020. His six successors, including Streeting, have pledged to “axe the fax”.

The Labour government pledged shifting from analogue to digital as one of its three main goals for the NHS, along with moving care from hospitals to communities and preventing sickness.

According to the British Medical Association’s figures gathered in 2022, doctors lose more than 13.5 million hours a year because of inadequate or malfunctioning IT.

Lord Darzi’s independent investigation of the NHS in England, published in September 2024, found that IT systems seem to “add to the workload of clinicians rather than releasing more time to care by simplifying the inevitable administrative tasks that arise.”

“Technology platforms that have existed in the private sector—such as automated route planning—for more than 15 years are rarely found in the NHS,” it stated.

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