TL;DR

GP surgeries are receiving AI-drafted complaints from patients that can run to 20 pages or more, the medical defence body MPS has warned, The Independent reported on Monday 12 October. In its survey of almost 160 UK practice managers, 45% said AI-drafted complaints were adding to workload pressure and hurting staff morale and wellbeing, and only 7% had never received one.

What practices are seeing

The MPS, which gives legal and indemnity support to healthcare staff, says it has seen a surge in practices asking for help with these letters. Its deputy medical director, Dr Sarah Townley, described them as often complicated, sometimes carrying “questionable legal arguments”, and frequently still containing the AI tool’s “coaching” and other giveaways.

She acknowledged the upside: AI can help patients who struggle with confidence, language or health conditions put their concerns in writing. The problem is the effort on the receiving end. Working out what the patient actually wants takes longer, which she warned may divert time from care. In one case, a member replied to such a letter and received a fresh response raising new issues within minutes.

Townley also suggested that drafting a complaint in seconds lowers the threshold for complaining, nudging people to fire off grievances while still angry rather than sorting things out by simpler means.

The wider response

The Royal College of GPs’ president, Professor Victoria Tzortziou Brown, defended patients’ right to complain but warned that AI can generate letters that are needlessly long, convoluted or wrong on the facts, sometimes with legal language out of proportion to the issue. Patients already have guidance from the Public Service Ombudsman, which favours plain accounts of what happened and advises against using AI to bolt on legal arguments or formal legal language. It also cautions that AI firms may train on the personal details people enter and handle them overseas.

Looking forward

General practice is the latest sector to report the same pattern we have tracked elsewhere: in councils and schools, in conveyancing, and, today, Scottish civil servants describing AI-drafted parliamentary questions. In our view, the strain is sharpest for already stretched practice teams that give each complaint careful consideration. Practices may need triage processes that pull out the core concern quickly, and patients would be better served by the ombudsman’s plain-language advice than by an AI-polished legal brief.