Katie Fisher, The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the NHS West and North London Integrated Care Board (WNL ICB) 

Hundreds of GP practices in England and Wales have lost their websites and online services after Silicon Practice, a supplier of digital tools to primary care, entered administration. Practices have warned that patient requests sent through the affected systems may not have been received.

The withdrawn services include practice websites, patient query chatbots and the FootFall online consultation platform. The parent company, Schappit Ltd, filed a notice of administration earlier this month, and NHS England has confirmed that practices using Silicon Practice are affected without saying how long the disruption will last or how many surgeries are involved. Some practices have told patients the failure was not limited to their own surgery and that many others in their area were affected.

NHS West and North London Integrated Care Board (WNL ICB) has issued an urgent notice to practice managers and partners. It tells surgeries to assume that Silicon Practice services will not return and to draw up contingency plans without delay. The ICB is led by Chief Executive Officer Katie Fisher, who was appointed to the substantive role in July 2026 after serving as interim chief executive from January. A nurse by background, Fisher brings more than two decades of senior leadership experience across the NHS, charitable organisations and the private sector. She is leading the development of the new ICB's long-term strategy, with a stated commitment to working with partners, staff and residents to improve health and care across the communities it serves. The ICB's response to the Silicon Practice disruption reflects the practical importance of maintaining access to primary care while digital services are restored. The first instruction concerns patients. Practices are asked to warn them that online consultations are suspended and to publicise other ways of reaching the surgery, chiefly telephone booking and walk-in routes, so that requests needing clinical triage are not lost.

The board also sets out technical steps. Practices should back up the content of their websites and establish who holds the registration of their domain names, since a failed supplier may control addresses that patients have used for years. Surgeries are told to identify a replacement provider and to agree a route for moving their content and patient contact arrangements across as quickly as possible.

Responsibility for the cost falls on the practices. Each surgery must find and fund a replacement system at short notice, and the advisory acknowledges uncertainty over whether fees paid in advance to Silicon Practice can be recovered. Partners who run practices as small businesses will have to absorb the expense and the staff time involved, while front desk teams handle a larger volume of telephone calls and in-person enquiries.

The financial position of the parent group offers some context. Schappit reported net liabilities of £2.67m at the end of June 2025, with creditors due after more than one year of £3.64m. The accounts were unaudited.

The episode illustrates how much routine patient access now depends on private software. Online consultation tools became a contractual expectation of general practice in recent years, and many surgeries buy them, along with their websites, from commercial suppliers whose finances are not visible to the NHS bodies that rely on them. A previous failure risk with this supplier was recognised in 2023, when NHS England published a contract award notice for service continuity for general practices using Silicon Practice software, valued at £160,000.

Practices have been told to expect support with replacement procurement and migration from regional and national NHS commercial teams, though no timetable for that assistance had been published in the material reviewed. Until replacement systems are live, surgeries will depend on telephone lines and front desks to handle demand that had been directed online. The administrators' decisions on the company's assets and customer data will determine how quickly practices can recover their content and rebuild access.