NHS Online: Extending workforce research to the wider clinical workforce

NHS Online will deliver elective care without a physical site, connecting patients through the NHS App to clinicians working anywhere in England. A model like this relies on clinicians being willing to offer time alongside their existing roles. Earlier this year we published research on consultants and SAS doctors. Edge Health was commissioned to extend it to the wider clinical workforce, to help shape the future workforce model and the design decisions behind it. The survey ran between 22 June and 31 July 2026 and gathered 2,085 responses, most of them nursing staff (1,114) and allied health professionals (644). Eight focus groups with 57 clinicians followed in July.

Interest is high. 66% of clinicians said they would be willing to offer time to NHS Online alongside their substantive role, slightly above the 60% recorded among consultants and SAS doctors. Interest is consistent across professional groups, with only six percentage points between the highest and lowest.

The wider workforce has had less exposure to virtual care than consultants and SAS doctors, but that has not dampened interest. Self-reported confidence in delivering care remotely is a stronger predictor of willingness to offer time than prior experience of it, and interest is strong among clinicians who have had limited opportunity to date. Learning and development matters far more to this group as a motivator, pointing to a pool of clinicians who want to work this way and currently have nowhere locally to do it.

What attracts clinicians, and what concerns them, is the same as in the earlier research. Flexibility across location and time and the opportunity to increase earnings are the main draws, though when ranked against each other competitive pay comes out clearly ahead of flexibility. The leading barriers remain lack of time, medico-legal responsibility and the potential impact on tax or pension thresholds. In the focus groups, clinicians were specific about what would address the medico-legal concern. They wanted a named person they could contact quickly to escalate to, and access to relevant care records.

Clinicians describe time given to NHS Online as something that fits around a substantive role rather than replacing part of it. Most envisage four to eight hours a week, picked up ad hoc with a couple of weeks’ notice rather than as a regular scheduled shift, and largely in the evenings and at weekends. Daytime availability comes mainly from those working less than full time, so day and out-of-hours capacity will be drawn from different parts of the workforce.

Casual contracts are preferred by a wide margin, more so than among consultants and SAS doctors, driven by reluctance to take on fixed hours rather than greater enthusiasm for casual working. AHPs made a further point that they have far less access to NHS bank work than nursing or medical staff, so a casual model would fill a genuine gap for them.

There is substantial interest in NHS Online across the clinical workforce, and it sits comfortably alongside what we found among consultants and SAS doctors. The same motivations, the same concerns and the same preference for flexible working come through in both, which gives reasonable confidence that one workforce model can serve the whole clinical workforce.

Read our report