What is the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag?

The Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag is a national, visible marker on a person’s record, which indicates any reasonable adjustments needed by a person with a disability whenever and wherever they are seen or treated by any publicly-funded health and social care service.

The digital flag enables services to record, share and view the reasonable adjustments and take steps to meet them.

Once fully implemented across England, the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag is expected to help millions of disabled people who need reasonable adjustments, helping them to access health and social care services more easily and more equitably.

All NHS and other health and social care services that are publicly-funded must be able to share, write to and read from the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag by 30 September 2026.

For health and social care service providers

Important information for health and care providers about the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag

A new information standard for the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag was published by the NHS in December 2025. You can read it here: Information Standards Notice, December 2025.

The new information standard makes 3 key changes:

  1. It requires that all NHS and other health and social care services that are publicly funded take steps to comply fully with the information standard by 30 September 2026 – enabling them to share, read and write reasonable adjustments data via NHS England’s National Care Records Service (previously known as ‘the NHS spine’).

You can read this summary checklist of actions all providers must now follow.

  1. The deadline for full national compliance has been extended from 31 December 2025 to 30 September 2026 to allow more time for the large number of health and social care providers and their software suppliers to get ready for full national compliance.
  2. The new information standard changes the basis of consent required for sharing a person’s personal information from explicit to implied consent. Information on the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag will be shared by implied consent and, as such people can raise objections to this data being shared at any time, unless there is a valid reason why it should be shared. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 should be consulted with regards to decisions about capacity and competence.

Health and care providers: What actions must you take?

By 30 September 2026, all health and care providers must:

  • have processes in place to identify, record, flag, share, meet, review and update people’s reasonable adjustment needs on their software systems
  • ensure their software suppliers have registered their software on NHS England’s national supplier interest list
  • ensure all staff who use disabled people’s records learn about and understand reasonable adjustments so it becomes part of a standard approach to care and treatment for all disabled people. Health and social care professionals can get free, online training here: Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag – e-learning

Further resources

You can find examples of how organisations are achieving compliance and resources to support your organisation to do the same, including examples of each of the 6-step process on the NHS Futures platform (if you do not have currently have access, you can request this by clicking on the link and requesting an account).

Other key relevant policy and guidance:

Accessible information about the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag