FOI 2026/1588

I hope you’re well. I am writing under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request information held relating to the Patchs online consultation service used in NHS primary care.

Please provide the information below for the period 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2025 (or the closest equivalent 12-month period held).

1. National deployment / coverage
2. The number of GP practices in your remit using Patchs during the period
3. If you hold a list of practices using Patchs, please confirm whether it is held (I am not requesting patient-level data).
4. Monitoring and reporting

Please provide copies of any national-level reports, dashboards, KPIs, or regular performance updates held relating to Patchs (or Patchs’ performance in primary care), including any measures such as:

1. service availability/uptime or outage reporting
2. volumes of online consultation submissions (aggregate)
3. response-time metrics (aggregate)
4. patient satisfaction or accessibility measures (aggregate)
5. Outages / unavailability and incident reporting
6. Any incident logs, incident summaries, or supplier incident notifications held relating to Patchs being unavailable (planned or unplanned), including dates and durations where recorded.
7. If you does not hold dates/durations, please provide whatever incident counts or summaries are held for the period.
8. Capacity limits and “closing early”
9. Any documents held that describe, recommend, or set expectations for capacity limits for online consultation tools (including Patchs), such as daily caps on requests, queueing, or when a service is set to stop accepting new enquiries.
10. Any information held on the extent to which Patchs (or online consultation services) becomes unavailable for new requests before an advertised cut-off time (for example 18:30), at national level (aggregate only).

For avoidance of doubt, I am not requesting any patient-identifiable information.

If any part of this request is likely to exceed the Section 12 cost limit, please provide the information that can be supplied within the limit and advise what refinement would bring the remainder within scope. Where possible, please provide data in a machine-readable format (CSV/Excel) and documents as PDFs.

1a.  Approximately 43 GP practices using Patchs between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2025.

1b. Data held.

2a. The requested information relates to a live and ongoing procurement exercise. We are, therefore, applying Section 43(2) (Commercial Interests) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Section 43(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 states:

“Information is exempt information if its disclosure under this Act would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any person (including the public authority holding it)”.

Factors favouring disclosure.

There is an inherent public interest in ensuring that there is openness and transparency in the spending of public money. Transparency is likely to increase confidence in procurement processes and the purchasing decisions made by NHS GM. It also enables the public to understand whether NHS GM is getting value for money from its purchasing decisions.

Factors favouring non-disclosure.

However, we consider that disclosure at this stage would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of the supplier and NHS GM, as it could compromise the integrity of the procurement process and ongoing negotiations. If disclosed, it is likely to negatively affect their ability to negotiate or to compete in a commercial environment, particularly in relation to future commissioning, negotiation and value-for-money considerations.

Balancing Test.

After considering the arguments outlined above, we have decided to withhold this information.  While we recognise the public interest in transparency relation to NHS commissioning arrangements, we consider that maintaining a fair and competitive procurement process currently outweighs the public interest in disclosure. The position may be reviewed once the procurement has concluded

2b. Monthly reports are made available to commissioners via supplier submissions to NHSE; this is the only national reporting source and the report made available to commissioners focuses on activity stats rather than on per product usage.

The PATCHS website allows for CSV downloadable data aggregated to PCN and practice level.  These include the numbers of consultations divided into clinical/non clinical/GP messages.  These downloads are raw unformatted data and not presented in a dashboard format.  These reports are only accessible to named users at a locality level and are not available as a national or GM wide report.

Each practice has its own real-time dashboard.

2c. The PATCHS website allows for CSV downloadable activity data aggregated to PCN and practice level which includes the date and time of request, date and time of action being taken, date and time of request closure and the time taken between a request being made and an action being taken.  These downloads are raw unformatted data and not presented in a dashboard format.  These are only accessible to named users at a locality level and are not available as a GM wide report.

2d. The PATCHS website allows for CSV downloadable of patient feedback data aggregated to PCN and practice level which includes individual patient feedback scores for their practice, scores for the PATCHS user experience and free text comments about the ratings given.  These downloads are raw unformatted data and not presented in a dashboard format.  These are only accessible to named users at a locality level and are not available as a GM wide report.

3a. Due to the live and ongoing procurement exercise we consider this information exempt from disclosure please refer to the response to question 2a.

3b. Due to the live and ongoing procurement exercise we consider this information exempt from disclosure please refer to the response to question 2a

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