When we asked what AI does in their practices today, 84% named one thing: note-taking, the scribe that drafts the consultation notes a clinician would otherwise type after hours. AI has arrived in general practice, but narrowly, hovering over the keyboard and almost nowhere else.
The people doing the work are not asking whether the technology is clever. They are asking whether it will give them back a few minutes for the person in front of them, and whether they can trust it not to cause harm.
We then asked them to rank what worried them. This answer mattered more. Patient data privacy came first, clinical safety second, medicolegal exposure third. Cost came last. Then we asked how many clinicians read the terms and conditions of the tools they sign up to. The room agreed the answer was almost none.
Sit with that. The people who buy and run these tools are telling us the thing that frightens them is not the price. It is the fine print nobody reads, and what happens to a patient’s private information once it disappears inside a system they do not control.
Those fears are ours as well. The service we run is one of the main front doors into the health system, around 7000 contacts a day by phone, text and webchat to Healthline, 1737 and more than 30 other free services, each one a nurse, paramedic or counsellor working out what someone needs and getting them to it. We have been putting AI to work in those services, and it has shown us how much care that takes.
Last year, we piloted a summarisation tool across our mental health and clinical services. Our kaimahi, the nurses, paramedics, and counsellors who answer when someone is unwell or frightened or does not know where else to turn, spend much of their day writing up their contact with people seeking help. If a machine could draft that summary for a clinician to check, every saved minute was one returned to the next person on the line.
The pilot taught us that a single tool does not behave the same way across different kinds of work.
The same tool that helped our mental health kaimahi got in the way of our teletriage nurses, because triage is a faster, more agile conversation and the tool slowed it down, and that only showed when we looked at each service on its own. A single organisation-wide average would have looked encouraging and hidden the team it was not helping.
Anna Campbell is the chief support services officer at Whakarongorau Aotearoa/NZ Telehealth Services, which provides free digital and virtual health advice and support.
So every tool we look at now, whether an outside platform we choose to adopt or one being built for the job, meets a test we set deliberately, and it is not a technical one.
Does this free a nurse, paramedic, or counsellor for the person in front of them? A tool that earns its place? One that gets between them does not, however well it performs?
This is the case I want to make plainly. Governance is not the handbrake on AI in healthcare. It is what makes it safe to bring a tool near a vulnerable person at all. The tools that worked in our pilot worked because the people using them understood how they functioned, where their data went, and where the limits lay. Where staff understood that, they leaned in. Where they did not, they pushed back, and they were right to.
My read? That general practice is further ahead than the sector assumes. These clinicians are neither dazzled by AI nor frightened of it. They hold its promise and its danger in the same hand, which is where both belong.
In the end, this was never a story about technology. For more than a decade our people have answered the call or message when someone is unwell or worried, worked out what they need, and got them the right care, right away. A clinician hears the fear underneath the question. A counsellor knows when to stay on the line a little longer. That is people helping people, and no tool can do it in their place.
The job for all of us is a modest one. Keep the technology quietly behind the people doing the work, so the nurse, paramedic, pharmacist, doctor, or the counsellor are left with what only they can give: full attention on the person in front of them, and the time to care.
Anna Campbell is chief support services officer at Whakarongorau Aotearoa / NZ Telehealth Services.
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