NHS spends {pound}240m a year storing patient records, as ongoing paper use drives high costs

Did I read that correctly?Yup, the NHS spent almost £240m storing patient records in 2024-25, with a significant proportion of this spent on storing paper records, according to the King’s Fund.1That doesn’t sound A4-ordableQuite. Previous research from the think tank showed that the NHS spent £230m during 2023-24 on paper records alone. On average, an NHS trust spent £1.22m storing patient records during 2024-25, up from £1.19m in 2017-18.Time to bin paper records?More than 200 NHS sites still rely entirely on paper only records, the King’s Fund says. And a recent BMJ analysis found that only about a fifth of hospital trusts in England are using fully electronic systems for clinical record keeping.2What’s the paper trail?Ministers first set out ambitions to digitise health service documentation more than 25 years ago.3 A shift from analogue to digital is one of the three core pillars of the government’s 10 year plan for…