From Health 201AI Med Risk

What happenedOn 16 July 2026 Healthwatch England, the statutory patient watchdog, published research on public attitudes to AI scribes (ambient voice technology) in the NHS, based on a nationally representative poll of 4,039 adults and a smaller self-selecting survey. Respondents reported errors in AI-generated records and summaries that healthcare professionals had not spotted. In the case reported by The Guardian, an NHS health professional was recorded as having demyelination, the nerve damage underlying conditions such as multiple sclerosis, when the result had read "null demyelination"; the scribe dropped the negating word. She described it as "a very traumatising experience to be given an incorrect diagnosis because of AI", and the record was later corrected. Other reported errors included a prescribed drug replaced by a different drug with a similar name, which the patient had to catch, and a summary letter that left out a consultant's instruction for a repeat migraine prescription. Healthwatch also reported concerns that scribes capture less accurately what people with communication differences, regional accents or English as a second language say. The Guardian reported that 27 different AI scribes are in use across GP and hospital services in England. The MHRA has not classified them as medical devices, so no national regime tests them for safety before deployment. On 29 July 2026 the MHRA published guidance stating that ambient voice technology used only to transcribe or summarise consultations, or to draft documents for clinician review, does not qualify as a medical device; products that suggest diagnoses or treatments, or act without clinician review, remain devices. Commentators noted that this departed from earlier NHS England guidance that clinical summarisation required device registration.

Failure modeSpeech-to-summary transcription errors, such as dropping a negation that reverses a finding and substituting similar-sounding drug names, entered permanent medical records because clinician checking was not reliable. Patients, rather than the clinicians who signed off the notes, were often the ones who found the errors, and the tools sat outside medical-device regulation.

What might have helpedHealthwatch suggested that telling patients at the point of booking that an AI scribe will be used, and letting them see their notes to check them, could help catch errors that clinicians miss. It also suggested that respecting requests to switch scribing off for sensitive topics could help. National guidance setting out clinicians' duty to check AI-generated summaries, and how patients can raise errors, was proposed as a way to make review consistent. Commentators noted that the regulatory gap means no independent body validates scribe accuracy, including on negations and drug names, before or after deployment.