One hundred and eighty years after the first fax machines began transmitting messages, three NHS trusts in England still use the technology.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has made it his mission to ban faxes, promising Radio 5 Live in October 2024 to stop using them in the health sector within a year.
Now he's back with an update—and it's not quite a mission accomplished.
“I'm pleased to say that after I went and searched the NHS for evidence of fax machine use, of the 205 NHS trusts there are in the country, only three now use fax machines for routine use: Leeds, Birmingham, Shrewsbury and Telford,” Streeting said.
“Now, as for Leeds and Birmingham, they have a plan to phase them out completely in the next 12 months.
“Shrewsbury and Telford will have to wait a little longer.”
Streeting told me he is now working with three institutions – Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – to move into the 20th century, if not the 21st.
But he added: “I decided that since these trusts told me that if I politically ordered them to stop using them I would cause them some pretty serious operational headaches, I decided to do the right thing and explain to you that there are three other trusts using fax machines.”
Fax machines, formally known as fax machines, used to be a common piece of equipment in offices, as well as schools, hospitals and police stations across the country.
They worked by allowing users to enter a page of text or images into the machine, which was sent over a telephone line and printed for the recipient.
This technology was supplanted by email in the early 2000s, but it persists in some offices, especially in health services.
Back in December 2018, Conservative Health Secretary Matt Hancock banned the NHS from buying new fax machines and ordered them to be phased out completely by April 2020.
His promise to “give up the fax” was repeated by his six successors in the post, including Streeting. And yet they held on.
In 2024, Streeting committed to returning to 5 Live within a year with an update on his mission to eradicate what he once called “ancient technology”.
“One is too many,” he said. “I’ll come back in a year and tell you where I need to go.”
Now he has revealed the scale of the problem.
“Obviously they're not used heavily, but they will be sent because some of these trusts are multi-entity, some of them are cross-departmental, so things like that are used from time to time.”
Elsewhere, a number of trusts keep fax machines in stock in case other forms of communication fail.
Streeting added: “The interesting thing is that the NHS still has fax machines, but they are in cupboards.
“Another pushback I got from the system was that we still need faxes in the world of cybersecurity and cyberattacks because if there is a system problem, we need to be able to pull them out of the closet so we can continue to communicate.
“Again, I thought that was a reasonable explanation.
“But this means that this promise was first made six health ministers ago.
“If you're listening, Matt Hancock, I understand the NHS has finally delivered on your promise.”
Listen to Matt Chorley live from Westminster weekdays from 2pm on BBC Radio 5 Live.
