Your report (One in seven in UK prefer consulting AI chatbots to seeing doctor, study finds, 13 May) will no doubt be greeted with the usual hand‑wringing about the decline of human connection in healthcare. But the more honest explanation is far simpler: many of us no longer see our registered doctor in any meaningful sense.
Continuity of care has quietly evaporated. General practice has become a rotating cast of locums, telephone triage and “someone will call you back at some point between 8am and the heat death of the universe”. The idea of a named GP – someone who knows your history, your face – has become NHS folklore, spoken of wistfully but rarely encountered in the wild.
Against that backdrop, the rise of chatbots is not a cultural shift, but a coping mechanism. If the system has already replaced relationship‑based medicine with transactional encounters, it’s hardly shocking that people start choosing the transaction that is at least predictable, is available, and doesn’t require a 7.59am redial marathon.
The real concern is not that patients are turning to AI. It’s that the NHS has left a vacuum where primary care used to be, and nature, as ever, abhors a vacuum.
Richard Eltringham
Leicester
• When you phone my GP surgery, you are asked not to continue if you have any of the following: heart attack, chest pain, stroke, confusion, difficulty breathing, bleeding, seizure, infection, high fever.
Urged to complete the online form to get a GP appointment, you are faced with a demanding list including your symptoms, when it started, how they have changed, how the issue is affecting your day-to-day life, and anything you have tried to help (plus photos).
I understand that this helps the surgery decide the most appropriate clinical response, but it’s exhausting. It’s quicker to put that lot into ChatGPT and find out if you’re about to shuffle off this mortal coil.
Barbara Riddell
Epsom, Surrey
• Your report on patients turning to AI chatbots demonstrates a growing demand for greater access to care in the NHS. But this does not end with patients; doctors are increasingly using unregulated AI tools in their daily practice. If we don’t give people a regulated alternative, it will inevitably drive more people to untrusted sources for serious health issues.
The result is exactly the shadow AI economy described by Prof Graham Lord, the lead author of the study on which you report. Mixed public trust in medical AI is not a reason to slow down innovation, but to regulate it the same way that we regulate any other clinical tool. Waiting times are down in line with government targets, but a third of treatments still take longer than 18 weeks. These improvements wouldn’t be possible without digitisation, but NHS leadership needs to get ahead of this shift instead of leaving it to the frustration of the patients.
Dr Katie Baker
UK director, Tandem Health, and former NHS GP
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