Clinical answers that show their working.

The NHS Advice & Guidance system let GPs submit clinical questions to specialists, who reviewed and answered them when capacity allowed. Every query entered the same manual queue, whether it involved a complex case or a question the team had answered many times before.

For routine queries, much of the work was finding the relevant guidance and pasting it into a response. The brief was to reduce that repetition without removing clinical oversight: draft a grounded, cited answer for the specialist to approve, edit or replace before the GP saw it.

A retrieval pipeline over NICE and BSR guidance, wrapped in a clinical workflow rather than a chat window.

• Answers from the guideline, not from memory. The documents are chunked with their sections and tables intact, retrieved by vector search, and handed to the model as passages; so a numbered reference points at the text that produced the sentence.
• A refusal instead of a guess. Below the confidence threshold the system declines, and the case still goes to a human.
• A specialist in front of every answer. They approve, request a revision, or replace it entirely. The GP sees nothing until they act.