UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD – FUTURE NURSE – WHITE PAPER
Realising the Potential of Ambient Voice Technology in Nursing
AVT is already changing clinical documentation. For nursing, the opportunity goes beyond reducing administration: it could create more time for care, strengthen therapeutic relationships and make the contribution of nursing more visible. The white paper explains what must be in place to realise that potential safely.
Nursing sits firmly at the heart of healthcare delivery. As systems face operational pressures, increasing complexity, and accelerating technological change, a key challenge is how new technologies and ways of working are introduced, who shapes them, and whether they genuinely improve care and outcomes.
Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) is one of the most visible applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. Current evidence focuses on its ability to reduce documentation burden and improve productivity. For nursing, the potential is much greater: creating more time for care, strengthening therapeutic relationships, and generating richer intelligence about nursing’s contribution to healthcare outcomes.
Future Nurse’ leadership expertise and professional community is combined with the University of Salford’s expertise in digital health, AI, research, innovation and education for this white paper and underpinning report.
The message emerging from our comprehensive, interdisciplinary and nursing-led exploration of AVT is clear:
of the NHS clinical workforce are nurses
of shifts can be spent interacting with electronic health records
in the nursing evidence review
The Government’s 10-Year Health Plan places technologies such as AVT at the forefront of efforts to modernise care delivery. AVT is already reshaping clinical documentation practices. It is anticipated to reduce administrative burden, improve workforce experience, and release more time for care. For nursing AVT is also acting as a catalyst for conversations about the connections and tensions between person centred care and documentation.
Nurses are around 50% of the NHS’ clinical workforce, and they spend much of their working time interacting with electronic health records (22-33% of shift time) and administrative systems, which can impact patient care. AVT presents an opportunity to create more time for therapeutic interactions with service users, carers and families through workflow efficiency, reduced duplication, and more timely documentation.
We have combined a mapping of wider interprofessional healthcare evidence, a review of the nursing evidence base for AVT (12 studies), an assessment of international approaches, insights from a Nursing Out Loud listening event with 79 nurses, healthcare leaders, service users, learners, researchers, policymakers, educators, and industry representatives plus views from a dedicated AVT Special Interest Group advisory board. Together, these perspectives provide a robust foundation for identifying the conditions needed to support effective and equitable adoption of AVT in nursing practice.
There are reasonable grounds to believe that, when implemented well, AVT can support more efficient and person-centred care, while also generating valuable intelligence about nursing practice. Stronger evidence and robust evaluation are needed to substantiate these outcomes and to understand AVT’s impact on care quality, good and bad.
Nursing Out Loud event participants were cautiously optimistic about the potential of AVT, tempered by the realities of nursing practice. AVT’s benefits in nursing depend on strong leadership, workforce capability, robust governance, infrastructure readiness, and meaningful involvement of nurses in design, implementation, and evaluation.
Drawing on evidence, stakeholder insights and interdisciplinary expertise, the white paper proposes three shifts in how AVT is designed, introduced and assessed.
Recommendation: Use AVT as a catalyst to redesign nursing workflows and practice.
Our work identified AVT’s greatest potential in reducing documentation burden and creating more time for person-centred care. However, AVT should not simply be layered onto existing documentation processes. Instead, to yield the greatest benefit, organisations should use its introduction as an opportunity to remove duplication, simplify documentation, redesign workflows, and rethink how and when information is recorded.
Recommendation: Design AVT around the reality of nursing practice.
AVT should be co-designed with nurses and service users so that technology use reflects the realities of nursing care across the full range of hospital, community, and other healthcare settings, including noisy and busy settings such as A&E.
Current AVT approaches may not fully capture the observations, clinical judgement, coordination, relationship-centred care, and contextual decision-making that are key to high-quality nursing. Success should be measured by whether AVT captures nursing care in a more meaningful, person-centred, and clinically useful way than existing methods.
Recommendation: Generate better intelligence, not just better notes.
AVT has the potential to generate new intelligence about nursing activity, clinical decision-making, service user experience, and care quality. This creates an opportunity to move towards documentation as a source of actionable insight, rather than simply a regulatory requirement. If nursing care can be captured more naturally at the point of care, this could support service improvement, workforce planning, research, policy development, and a deeper understanding of nursing’s contribution to health and care outcomes.
AVT will only realise its potential if it reflects the realities of nursing practice. A stronger nursing voice in the evidence base, procurement decisions, product design, and implementation strategies is essential. Future product development and adoption should be shaped, with nurses, around clinical workflows that reflect the complexity of nursing care.
Nurse leaders should advocate for the needs and priorities of the profession and service users as AVT approaches develop. Technology vendors should co-design solutions with nurse leaders, nurses, service users, and healthcare organisations to make them more likely to contribute to improved quality of care, patient experiences, and outcomes.
Confidence in AVT depends on governance arrangements that support innovation while visibly protecting service users, professionals, and organisations. Human oversight is widely recognised as the primary safeguard for AI-assisted documentation, but understanding of how this works in practice is limited. Checking and reviewing AI-generated information may increase staff workload and create additional risks, pressure, and cognitive burden.
Regulatory and professional bodies should provide clearer guidance on clinical safety, evidence collection, responsibility for AI-generated records, and the role of human review.
Both national and local organisations should address consent, information governance, auditability, traceability, equity, interoperability with EHRs, supplier assurance, and professional accountability.
Technology suppliers should be more transparent about what their systems can and cannot do, the risks involved, how they are assured, and the evidence supporting their products.
The anticipated value of AVT relies on the digital foundations for safe, scalable implementation. This includes systems that work with EHRs, reliable digital infrastructure and connectivity, access to appropriate devices, agreed data standards, implementation of national nursing information standards, and organisational readiness to support new ways of working. AVT should be implemented as part of wider service transformation and improve how information is captured, shared, and used across care pathways.
The successful adoption of AVT depends on a workforce that is confident, capable and supported to use digital and AI-enabled technologies safely and effectively. Concerns about over-reliance on AI, deskilling of nurses, erosion of independent documentation capabilities, and working safely when systems fail or are unavailable.
The benefits of automation depend upon workforce confidence and capability, yet capability itself requires sustained investment in education, training, leadership development, and professional support. Workforce development should encompass pre-registration education, continuing professional development, leadership development, communities of practice, and digital career pathways.
Policy
Establish nursing leadership, governance frameworks, and national nursing intelligence standards.
Practice
Use AVT to redesign workflows, create time for care, and strengthen person-centred practice.
Research
Build nursing-led evidence focused on outcomes, safety, workforce impact, equity, and nursing intelligence.
AVT is already shaping approaches to healthcare documentation. In our view, the greatest potential of AVT lies not in documenting care faster, but in creating more time for person-centred care, capturing the complexity of nursing practice more meaningfully, and generating new intelligence about nursing’s contribution to health and care outcomes. Realising this potential requires nursing leadership, robust governance, digital readiness, workforce capability, and ongoing evaluation.
AVT must be implemented with and by nurses, so that it reflects the realities of practice and delivers meaningful benefits for the workforce and the people they care for.
This brief is informed by research conducted at the University of Salford, jointly led by Dr Cristina Vasilica and Dr Pooya Soltani, with contributions from Joshi Prabhu RN, Christian Clausner, and A. Radu, in partnership with Natasha Phillips and Future Nurse. Please see the full report: Time to Act: Realising the Potential of Ambient Voice Technology in Nursing (University of Salford and Future Nurse, 2026).
This brief is informed by research conducted at the University of Salford, jointly led by Dr Cristina Vasilica and Dr Pooya Soltani, with contributions from Joshi Prabhu RN, Christian Clausner, and A. Radu, in partnership with Natasha Phillips and Future Nurse. Please see the full report: Time to Act: Realising the Potential of Ambient Voice Technology in Nursing (University of Salford and Future Nurse, 2026).
