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Why Telehealth Onboarding Takes Longer Than It Should
Your new remote GP accepted the offer four weeks ago. The pre-employment checks are still outstanding. She’s ready to start virtual consultations, but she’s stuck in the same onboarding process that delays on-site clinicians.
NHS Digital data shows 106,432 vacancies across England as of March 2025. When you finally recruit someone, delays during onboarding mean patients wait longer for care and your organisation loses revenue. For telehealth roles, where staff can technically work from day one if their checks clear, every extra week is wasted capacity.
Telehealth Staff Face the Same Six Pre-Employment Checks
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulates telehealth services in exactly the same way as face-to-face care. Remote consultations delivered by video or telephone are regulated activities under the Health and Social Care Act 2008, which means telehealth providers must meet identical compliance standards to traditional services.
NHS Employment Check Standards require six pre-employment checks for all appointments, regardless of whether the role is on-site or remote:
• Identity and right to work verification
• Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks
• Work health assessments
• Professional registration and qualifications (GMC, NMC, HCPC)
• References and employment history verification
• Occupational health clearance
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust aims to complete pre-employment checks within 20 days. Many organisations take longer. DBS checks alone can take 4-6 weeks to process once the application is submitted.
For telehealth clinicians who could begin consultations immediately once checks clear, delays of 60+ days between offer and start date waste capacity your organisation needs.
Professional Registration Adds Complexity for Remote Consultations
The General Medical Council (GMC) requires all doctors providing remote consultations to UK-based patients to hold GMC registration and a licence to practise, even if the doctor is working from overseas. This creates an additional verification requirement for telehealth providers employing clinicians outside the UK.
The same principle applies to nursing staff. The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and other professional regulators expect remote consultation standards to match face-to-face practice standards exactly. That means verifying current registration, checking for conditions or restrictions on practice, and confirming professional indemnity insurance before anyone begins clinical work.
Organisations using locum or bank staff for telehealth services compound the problem. Every new clinician requires the full suite of checks, even for short-term placements. When you’re scaling telehealth capacity quickly to manage demand, manual verification processes become a bottleneck.
CQC Inspections Apply the Same Standards to Remote Care
The CQC published specific inspection criteria for organisations providing remote consultations in March 2017. Inspectors scrutinise clinical assessment processes, prescribing practices, staff qualifications, data protection measures, and information sharing with patients’ registered GPs.
CQC has suspended licences for providers failing to meet these standards. For multi-site organisations offering both on-site and telehealth services, compliance gaps in remote care processes create risk across the entire operation.
Key compliance areas inspectors examine include:
• Verification that GPs are on the GMC register with a current licence
• Evidence that other clinicians hold appropriate professional registration
• Confirmation that remote prescribing follows GMC and NMC high-level principles
• Systems for adequate clinical assessment without face-to-face examination
• Data protection and information governance processes
Manual tracking of professional registration renewals and DBS expiration dates across a distributed telehealth workforce creates compliance risk. When registration lapses and HR teams don’t catch it immediately, clinicians may deliver care without valid credentials. That becomes a CQC inspection finding with serious consequences.
Onboarding Speed Affects Telehealth Recruitment Outcomes
Research from out-of-hours primary care services found that training for telephone consultations was more effective when it was proactive, systematic, and mainstreamed rather than ad hoc. The same principle applies to onboarding.
When pre-employment checks drag on for weeks, candidates accept other offers. NHS vacancy data shows a 6.0% vacancy rate for registered nursing staff, equating to 25,632 open posts across England. Medical staff vacancies stand at 7,248 posts. Competition for clinical staff is intense.
Telehealth roles can be particularly attractive to experienced clinicians seeking flexible working arrangements. But if your onboarding process takes eight weeks while a competitor completes checks in three, you lose candidates to faster-moving organisations.
For staffing agencies supplying locum or bank staff to multiple NHS trusts and private providers, onboarding delays multiply across every placement. A locum GP completing separate pre-employment processes for three different organisations spends months in administrative loops instead of delivering consultations.
Modern Onboarding Platforms Reduce Timeline and Admin Burden
Healthcare organisations using manual processes for telehealth onboarding typically rely on spreadsheets to track check status, email chains to request documents, and separate systems for DBS applications, reference requests, and professional registration verification.
Modern onboarding platforms automate much of this work. Automated professional registration checks verify GMC, NMC, and HCPC status in real time rather than requiring HR teams to log into multiple registers manually. DBS applications and right-to-work verification integrate into single workflows that candidates complete digitally.
Platforms like Credentially have reduced onboarding timelines from 60 days to as little as 5 days by eliminating manual handoffs and giving candidates direct access to complete their own checks. For telehealth providers hiring distributed clinical teams, that compression in timeline means staff begin revenue-generating work weeks earlier.
Compliance monitoring becomes continuous rather than periodic. When a clinician’s GMC registration or DBS check approaches expiration, automated alerts notify HR teams and the clinician directly. That prevents compliance gaps that would otherwise surface during CQC inspections.
Organisations using these systems report administrative time reductions of 68%, freeing HR teams to focus on recruitment and retention rather than chasing paperwork.
What to Prioritise When Onboarding Telehealth Staff
Start by mapping your current onboarding timeline from offer letter to first shift. Identify where delays consistently occur. DBS processing times and occupational health appointments are common bottlenecks.
For telehealth-specific requirements, verify that your processes cover:
• Professional registration verification for all clinical staff, with systems to track renewal dates
• Compliance with GMC and NMC remote consultation standards, including confirmation that clinicians understand limitations on remote prescribing
• Data protection and information governance training specific to telehealth platforms
• Technology competency checks to ensure clinicians can use video consultation systems effectively
Research from GP practices found that unclear policies increase variability and reduce clinician confidence, particularly for staff new to remote consultations. Build standardised onboarding processes that give every telehealth clinician the same training and compliance foundation.
Finally, recognise that onboarding speed affects both recruitment outcomes and operational capacity. When you can bring telehealth staff online in days rather than weeks, you fill rota gaps faster and reduce the revenue loss from unfilled clinical sessions.
The six NHS Employment Check Standards apply equally to on-site and remote roles. The difference is that telehealth clinicians can begin work from anywhere once checks clear. Every week you save in onboarding is a week of patient care delivered sooner.
Ready to reduce telehealth onboarding from weeks to days? See how Credentially automates pre-employment checks and compliance monitoring for NHS trusts, private providers, and healthcare staffing agencies. Book a demo to explore how automated onboarding works for distributed clinical teams.
Sources
1. NHS England - Virtual clinics in Highly Specialised Services guidance
2. CMS Law - Digital health apps and telemedicine in the United Kingdom
3. Doctors Defence Service - Remote Consultations and the GMC
4. NHS England - Remote consulting
5. Care Quality Commission - Additional prompts for online healthcare providers
6. GMC - Remote consultations ethical topic
7. GMC - Remote prescribing high level principles
8. NHS Employers - Employment standards and regulation
9. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust - Pre-employment checks
10. The King’s Fund - NHS Workforce Nutshell
11. NHS Digital - NHS Vacancy Statistics
12. Nuffield Trust - The NHS workforce in numbers
13. PMC - Training needs for staff providing remote services in general practice
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