Introduction
Welcome to the transforming primary care podcast an exploration of how teams across the North East and Yorkshire region are making improvements which make it easier and quicker for patients to get the help they need from primary care. Episode 3 is now available and the transcript is below.
Podcast transcript
James Butcher
Hello there and welcome to our podcast on the NHS App, which is going to tell you how to get the most out of the NHS App.
With me today for the podcast, I have James Higgott who’s head of product for the NHS App, and he’s based in London. From the North East and Yorkshire team. I’m delighted that we’ve got three NHS App Ambassadors with us. We have Lianne Jerome, she’s the digital and transformation lead for Yorkshire Health Partners. Joining her is Katie Day, Digital support officer for Connexus. Katie’s working with 35 GP practices in Wakefield.
And last of all, but not least, we’ve got Alex Mills, with the North of England, Commissioning Support Unit. Alex is based in Durham and he’s supporting the Primary Care Access Recovery Plan for North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board. They’re all NHS App Ambassadors in the North East and Yorkshire region.
I’m just going to give you a quick overview before we start some questions.
Owned and run by the NHS in England, the NHS App provides a simple and secure way for people to access a range of NHS services on their smartphones or tablets. The NHS App can also be accessed via the NHS website.
The NHS App is home to a range of features that enable patients to access services from the comfort of their homes, or actually anywhere they choose to be, provided that they’re online.
Services available to patients range from viewing their GP health record information to nominating their preferred pharmacy.
Patients in many parts of England are now able to view and manage their hospital appointments on the NHS App, and many GP practices are now sending NHS App notifications to patients with appointment reminders. Now for me that’s absolutely brilliant because I’m always forgetting things and I need reminders. There will also be other messages relating to their healthcare too.
So in this episode, we’ll discuss how NHS App use has increased across the region. We’ll also discuss the next steps for this front door to NHS services, which is currently used by over 35 million users in England. The most active group being pensioners.
Now on to my first question. How is the NHS at being changing recently and how is that making it easier for people to use? Now I’m going to bring in James Higgott here, NHS App Head of Product.
James Higgott
Hi there James. Thank you. You asked about how the NHS App has been changing recently, and how we’re making it easier for people to use. So, I mean, we conduct regular user research to understand our users’ sort of needs and pain points they experience with the app.
To give an example, one of the most common complaints we get is about logging in and the overall sort of speed and performance of the app. We’ve got a series of changes happening on that front, at the moment – we’ve recently reduced the time it takes to log in and load that home screen of the app on Apple devices by about two seconds.
We’ve also reduced the time it takes to get your prescription data onto your screen by about four seconds. Now, these sound like small changes, but they’re really huge in terms of like that overall user experience and the number of people who sort of benefit from these.
We’ve got quite a lot more to come on this front. We’ve also done an awful lot of things like reducing the number of clicks it takes between sort of, you know, seeing a notification about a message and actually getting to read that message, navigating to your inbox. So these are some of the usability improvements that we’ve made recently. We’re also all the time sort of deploying new features, new functionality that that really addresses user needs. A very recent example, one I’m really excited about is prescription order tracking, so allowing people to see the status of their prescriptions and to see when it’s actually ready to pick up from the pharmacy.
You mentioned that the app is particularly popular with pensioners. I’ve got a little stat about that if it would be helpful, for a slightly wider age group than pensioners, but we’ve got, we’ve got about 15,000,000 registered users between the ages of.40 and 74 and 11 million or 72% of those have been active on the NHS App doing something in the last 12 months and that compares to about 56% across all age groups. So you can see that sort of 40 to 74 year old age group is on average more active on the NHS App than other age groups.
James Butcher
Thank you very much for that, James. Fascinating stuff. Now what I’d like to do here is bring in some of our app ambassadors to say how these changes really translate for patients right down at practice level. Leanne, perhaps we can start with you.
Lianne Jerome
Yeah, no problem. In one of our practices in Market Weighton, we’ve got a really good uptake in the NHS App and that’s at 60- 89% overall of their practice population, which is phenomenal, but that’s got a massive impact with the ordering of the prescriptions. Now with the new way to do that, at least the patients are now not having to ring the surgery. The information is there ready for them. So it’s a really good addition to the app and welcomed by practices.
James Butcher
That’s just brilliant to hear. Thank you very much for that Lianne. Can I ask either Katie or Alex to come in, introduce themselves and perhaps tell a similar story, a positive story.
Katie Day
Yeah, I’m Katie. We have a lot of our practices that are trying to switch over to patients ordering more on the app rather than having to ring into the surgery or do it any other way.
We have worked with practices with their health champions to deliver NHS App events in their practices, and those practices have actually like doubled the amount of prescriptions that have been ordered on the app.
James Butcher
Thank you. And Alex?
Alex Mills
Yes, so in our little corner of the world in the North East, we see sort of a natural increase in digital tools within primary care taking place over the years. I think that’s a tribute to the region in general , especially for secondary care. But naturally NHS App has got to a point where practices aren’t aware that so much, so many of their patients actually have it, and the particular story came through from the Sunderland area, whereby A, a practice wasn’t aware that either had so many patients on the NHS App and B, the majority of them had the notifications enabled.
So when they sent those flu vaccine flu clinic appointments out via the app, they actually got quite a good return. Which obviously led to SMS reductions and also it just speeds up the patient journey much quicker rather than ringing in or going up and via more traditional methods. And we worked out, they actually saved about 700 and 730 fragments within a single month, which is huge. But yeah, it’s just getting that message across to patients via the practices which is what we’ve done in the area. We’ve worked specifically with practices under the primary care access recovery plans, as well as the modern general practice tool improvement, so we try to streamline practice processes through the app and skill where possible.
But yeah, the notifications on the prescription statuses is a really good one, particularly for dispensing practices. They had an issue with the previous way things were done whereby if it was issued on the app the patient would attend practice and that prescription possibly wasn’t ready just because it’d been issued. So those are very welcome changes. I’m looking forward to see how, how they get on.
James Butcher
Thank you very much to all you such a so great to hear it’s making such a positive impact across the North East and Yorkshire region. I’m going to move on to my next question now, which is aimed at the ambassadors again. So feel free to just come in as you want to.
How do you get practices and the public to understand the benefits of the NHS App? What approaches have been successful when engaging different patient groups with the app?
Lianne Jerome
I’ll go James. We in one of our PCNs we got a handful of staff from each practice to be NHS App Ambassadors so that they weren’t scared if somebody did come in and say what’s happening with the NHS App because you can be in a practice and people say I really don’t know how to help you, I don’t know anything about it.
So if you give the tools to the staff to be able to help the patient, because if a staff member doesn’t know how to navigate the NHS App, how are they going to even like give a patient that encouragement to do it themselves?
We made quite a few of ours NHS App Ambassadors and we do drop in sessions in the waiting areas now. So we sit in the waiting areas and we advertise the fact that we’re going to be sat there and they come in, they come ten-fold to come and see us with their issues they’ve got with the NHS App. I talk them through the app, I’ll show them videos on how to do it, if they’re not getting the way that I’m trying to talk to them, it really is successful that these practices have asked for some more dates for us to go in because they’ve had such good feedback for us to be sat in the waiting area.
It also takes the pressure off the staff in the practice, knowing that we’re going to come in. So, if you come back next week the App Ambassadors are going to be in there, we’ll be able to help you. It kind of helps the staff as well.
James Butcher
Thanks for that, Lianne. It’s great for me personally to hear about those practice staff being advocates of something so important, the national tool, the NHS App, because that’s, you know, for me, I think thinking it through, that’s where the changes can really, really be made at that practice level. So great to hear that. Katie, please come in.
Katie Day
Yeah. So we’ve, in Wakefield where I’m one of three digital support officers, we held a target event for all the reception and admin team within Wakefield. So we had over 400 reception admin staff that attended and we went through how to download the app. All the features that are available on the app to help the receptionist out so that if anybody came into practice and then obviously they feel more confident being able to talk the patients through what they needed to do.
We’ve also just started a patient volunteer group, so we put posters up in all our surgeries for volunteers to come along and help us deliver sessions on the NHS App because we’ve delivered a lot of sessions in GP practices ourselves.
And we want some help now out in the community. So we’ve got we had over 20 patients that came forward and volunteered and we’ve already trained 17 volunteers up to be able to go out in the community to help patients, you know, in libraries, we’ve just started connecting with the libraries, so they’re starting to go into there as well as other sort of coffee mornings that they are aware of within their community. Lianne, did you want to come in on that?
Lianne Jerome
Thanks, Katie. Just on the back of what you were saying about your patient volunteer group, the practice in our PCN, who has 69% uptake of their patients, actually have their patient participation group in their waiting area, like talking to the patients about the NHS App. So they’re really fully involved in the practice, that practice sends out monthly text messages to the patients to say please register for the NHS App, so that that whole town really does know that the practice does love the NHS App and really does champion it. So the PPG is really instrumental in the success of their NHS App.
James Butcher
Thank you, Some great initiatives there, thank you. Alex, please come into it. Anything to add?
Alex Mills
As I mentioned, our support has been more for the practices so our digital transformation service within the CSU, we set up a primary care digital support hub as part of as I mentioned the Primary Care Access Recovery plan which we’ve been instructed by the ICB to carry out.
Within that team we’ve developed a few things to support other tools, but with the guise of, you know, not discounting the NHS and try and get practices to take the utilisation up so we create an implementation plan which would, you know, empower the workforce to get hands on with the NHS App or, you know, the whole journey of implementing the NHS App, you know, promoting it, getting part of the staff on it, possibly getting an NHS App Ambassador in place to support practices within their own workforce, all that you know for you to sort of support patients where they can so.
We actually created a digital dashboard which pulls on all of the national data available for all the tools that could possibly be scaled within the app. So that’s part of the implementation plan as well.
We’ve sort of seen an increase with the app, so the benefit of that is they understand the app themselves. They understand the process behind the app. They’ve also reduced admin in in terms of support and other tools that they now use via the app.
Particularly when it comes to patients, because the patients obviously are not aware that there’s so much behind the app in terms of the different tools that are integrated into it. From a patient’s point of view, it’s a single, it’s a single point of access to the practice. So with that it reduces the 8am and it also gives the practice time to support those who may be lacking digital literacy or, you know, give the practice, allow the practice to give patients who have sort of digital health inequalities more time to get access to the practice via traditional methods as well. So it’s been a good sort of support package that you’ve put in place and the implementation plan has sort of adopted new cultures and practises, yep, so how are we getting on up here?
James Butcher
That’s great, Alex. Thank you very much for that. Really important. You know you’re talking there about digitally excluded communities. I think from my point of view as well, good to hear that data’s being used to like, you know, for the insights and that and that helps plan the regions like, you know, initiatives with the NHS App in terms of promotion as well. And I can see that James Higgott wanted to come in. So please James jump in.
James Higgott
Yeah, yeah, it’s just really great to hear about these initiatives also I think worth giving a shout out for the documentation and the downloadable resources that are available at digital.nhs.uk loads of sort of you know guidance and other things there that the practices can hopefully make use of.
James Butcher
Thank you. I’m going to move on to another question now. This one’s aimed predominantly at the App Ambassadors again.
What challenges do you face in your role? What are the main barriers to using the NHS App and how have you overcome them in your area?
Quite a lot there, Alex. Thank you. Over to you.
Alex Mills
Yeah, I’ll go first. So what we’ve noticed with our practices, you know the feedback they get from their patients, is it’s just the lack of awareness and patient engagement sort of being low since the COVID pandemic ended and the COVID digital passport was removed, a lot of you know, shall we call more, more fit and able patients who know don’t need to contact their practice for you know maybe long term conditions and things like that, weren’t actually aware, that the app was there and you know it’s actually available to them to manage their own health and to see their own record.
So again, we work with practices to implement a plan in place for the NHS App to also create awareness for patients as well.
So we started from the very beginning, you know, we did the refresh of the NHS App promotional material, mentioning what James Higgott just discussed about the support that’s available online. We, you know, we utilise the NHS App’s, sorry, the telephony system of practices to put an NHS App message on there just to highlight even more that’s had an impact on prescriptions and how they’re managed.
Again, we’ve worked with workforces within the practice to empower them, so that’s get them signed up, getting an NHS App Ambassador in place, you know, implementing a digital champion within their practice to explore opportunities to get on these NHS Ambassador sessions that we all attend. We’ve also worked with practices to think about SMS presets. So for patients on the phone and they don’t have the app, they can send a text to them, which gives them the sign up.
And also NHS App targeted social media campaigns within practice, you know, just utilising the promotional materials there and now that these walk through videos have come around, they’re huge because we can get that we can get the most common issues that practices are giving us out to the patients via their social media platforms.
Additionally, to overcome the, you know, the lack of awareness, we’re trying to link in with our local universities. The northeast is quite a big region, so we have quite a few universities up here. We are looking in to provide those videos to provide that promotional material and also to try and get boots on the ground and get into Freshers, although appreciate this year the ship has sailed but hopefully there’ll be some scope for that next year. The idea behind that is, is to empower regeneration to manage their own health via the app because it is there for them and it’s like you say, most users tend to be elderly and we’re finding with practices, you know the sort of 25 to 35 possibly they’ve ringing the practice, so the more we can get a generation change and you know, make them aware that this tools here and available for them. We might see a reduction in the 8am call queue, which is great.
We’re also trying different public initiatives, so stepping away from primary care for a second and exploring opportunities in which we can promote the app without impacting patient care without impacting practices and taking that burden away from them. So we are trying to link in with our local football clubs.
Again, we have quite a few here in The North East! We are trying to get promotional campaigns with them whereby we can get access to fan zone stadia. You know stadia promotion of the NHS App and things like that because that’s a big audience.
Trying to get boots on the ground for a fan zone because the football will be huge. If you can get people to sign up, that would be great. And then linking in with their foundations as well for when they have parent and child days to highlight proxy access and things like that. Although there’s nothing concrete in place at the minute, we are linking in with a few of them and we’re just sort of waiting to see if we can sort of plan things out across the year. I really do hope that comes to fruition because it’ll be huge. It’ll be huge for promotion here in the North East and all it will help the region, particularly those who are unaware and those who have those digital, you know, lack the digital literacy and you know, just in generally promoting the app because if they see advertised at their, you know, their big thing they do at a weekend, it’s huge, it’s huge.
James Butcher
You’re a busy person. That’s all I can say. There’s so much going on there. That’s absolutely amazing. And it’s lovely to hear as well. You’re talking about the walkthrough videos. You know, they’ve been so well received. I enjoy watching them myself. 30 to 40 seconds in length. You just hit the nail on the head and do what everyone wants them to do. So thank you very much for that. I’ll ask Katie and Lianne would they like to come in with anything and add – Katie.
Katie Day
Yeah. So we found that obviously being able to get into practice a lot of the patients especially obviously those that are elderly, the signing up process is obviously a robust process because it needs to be, it’s secure information that you’re giving the patients access to but they can find it quite daunting and obviously I mean we’ve helped over 700 people in our practice with that in the last year.
Yes, and each one of them, they’re so grateful that that you can actually help them through the process. And a lot of them do say that they would have struggled without that help being there.
James Butcher
That’s great. Thank you for that and thank you for your personal commitment to the cause as well. I mean, you know, James Higgitt had already been explaining some of the user research that takes place within our central teams with the NHS App and certainly you know some of the feedback that we run is taken into account when we’re making future builds, future releases. So really interesting to hear about the work that you’ve been doing there with all your service users. Thank you very much.
I’m going to move on to my next question now.
In the early days of the NHS App there was a lot of discussion around how it could potentially exclude certain groups. So my question really is how is the NHS App being used to address health inequalities? James H I’m going to bring you into this one.
James Higgott
Yes, thanks, James. So I think I probably want to talk a little bit here about maybe accessibility. So I mean accessibility is one of those is one of those things we take very, very seriously indeed. We have a regular audit of the app’s accessibility. It will always find small issues and we would then do our best to sort of resolve those issues. But as well as that regular audit, we’re testing every release that we put out there for use with screen readers and another assistive technology.
Our practices for user research means that we include people with, you know, with some form of access need in every round of user research that we do.
As well as that sort of, let’s say you know the screen readers and assistive technology we think very seriously about sort of health literacy and making sure that we keep the language on the NHS App is easy to understand as possible. I mean it is, it is about that you are going to need to have internet access ideally, you know you know a smartphone or a tablet in order to access the NHS App, but you know it’s worth calling out as well that you know there is a browser version of the NHS App that you can access through the NHS website. You can do that in libraries. You can do that in, you know any, well, any place that you can get a hold of the computer. So, you know, we do our best in terms of inclusion and accessibility. I wouldn’t say, you know, we’re absolutely perfect, but it is it is very, very high on our agenda.
James Butcher
Thanks for that, James. I’m going to let the ambassadors jump in in a minute, but I heard you say the word libraries and we’ve been doing a big national initiative on this. So, it would be remiss of me not to give it a mention at this present time.
So we all know that libraries offer a secure, trusted, safe, warm space where people can get access to digital health services. Data shows that people from more deprived communities are more likely to make use of our public libraries, therefore making them an excellent place to support people to digital health services, in this case, the NHS App.
So we’ve been doing something at a national level working with Libraries UK and this will see participating library staff being trained up to handle questions about the NHS App as well as being provided with a knowledge base of frequently asked questions about the NHS App. Libraries who have signed up to the initiative have been given a communications toolkit. This will support them with local promotion of the NHS App.
We’re going through a bit of a piloting phase with this at the moment around England at the time of this podcast of recording in October 2024 and what we’re seeing is a third of public libraries have been signed up to deliver this wonderful initiative. We’re hoping to roll out further right throughout the 2025 calendar year, so that all libraries in England are on board with this initiative. Thank you. I thought I’d get that in whilst I had a chance! And would any of the. Ambassadors that we have, Lianne, Alex, Katie. Have you anything that you’d like to add?
Lianne Jerome
I will come in, James. My other counterpart, who is my other NHS ambassador who’s comes with me to do the training. We did hear that the local library in one of our towns was doing digital to help people through the digital journey, but we weren’t sure whether that included the NHS App. So he was going to contact them to offer us to come in with them, to sit with the NHS App for anybody that wanted to talk about that and not just to try and get on the internet and work their way around how to get through that digital front door.
We’re also looking into we’ve got a local food bank, which is a community hub and going in there and showing people how to use the NHS App in there. So we’re looking at doing that as well. So that would be really good and just trying to hit those people that really do need that support.
James Butcher
Lianne that’s brilliant. Yeah. Really well done. And it’s good to hear that the library’s initiatives getting out there as well. That’s pleasing for me to hear. Katie, I’m going to bring you in now.
Katie Day
Yeah, just to mention that obviously the NHS App is great for those that are deaf. I went along to the Wakefield Deaf Society and got a few of their members on the app as well as connecting them through to the online consultation service through the app, which is great for them because obviously they can’t ring into the practice. So using an online consultation tool is just perfect for them to be able to use.
We’ve also been along to carers’ events because obviously carers can get proxy access and then obviously able to sort of order prescriptions on behalf of the patients. And so obviously it can help a lot in in that respect as well.
James Butcher
Wonderful. Thank you very much for that, Katie. So I’m going to move on to my final question now.
Thinking about future challenges, what are the next things on the NHS App road map as we call it, that will be particularly useful to patients. I’m going to ask James H to come in and start on this one.
James Higgott
Yeah. So I mean, I’ve made a bit of a list for this one. I’ll try to keep it short, but it’s quite a challenge to reduce it down. There’s an awful lot happening. So I mean, we’ve already talked a little bit about prescription order tracking that went live almost a month ago. Now, that’s with just a small number of pharmacies at the moment. So with a lot of things that go out, an awful lot of our attention will then be spent on actually scaling them up, getting that in the hands of more of our users and you know until we reach like full national coverage. So yeah, we’ll be doing a lot of work on that. Also in the prescription space or pharmacy space, we’re going to be ,we’re looking into how we might allow users to nominate a distance selling pharmacy within the NHS App, at the moment to nominate a pharmacy you can only select a bricks and mortar pharmacy.
We’ll look at a feature we released recently or earlier this year. A way of giving people a barcode with which they could get their prescriptions. We’ll look at how people might be able to put this into the digital wallet on their phones, so they don’t actually have to log into the app in order to access it. So you know, if they go into a building where there maybe isn’t very good data coverage, they’ll be able to sort of get hold of it in that way.
We’ve been making loads of improvements over the last year or so to the way that GP test results appear in the NHS App and we’ve got, we’ve got more improvements that we want to make in that space. So I’m showing more of those things as graphs and charts and sort of history so that you can see sort of, you know trends in your results, if it’s a test that you have multiple times.
We’re bringing more messages into the app, so more types of messages and more message senders, and we’re also going to be giving our users better tools to manage all of those messages in their inbox. We’re making improvements to the way in which users can manage secondary care appointments in the NHS App, and we’ve got a neat little feature coming soon which is going to allow people to add GP appointments, whether they put them through the app or not.
Add those to the calendar on their device so they can you know more easily sort of see that stuff in in amongst all their other things that they’re doing in their life.
We want to make it easier to access the Register with the GP service and so that people can, you know, more easily change the GP service that they’re registered with so that, you know, that’s just still a quite long selection of the stuff that’s on our road map. We do have a public version of this road map which is available on digital.nhs.uk if we can include the link to that in, I don’t know, the show notes or something, then that would be brilliant so that people can check that out. But yes you should be able to find it and do keep checking that because we update it several times a year.
James Butcher
Thanks for that, James. And I’m pretty sure we can get that that URL linked in so everyone can see it. Fascinating. Wow, what a big list you’ve got there. There’s lots going on, isn’t there? For me, I really like the stuff that’s happening with secondary care, you know, patients being able to live book and amend their appointments and the notifications and messaging space there as well, you know, moving our trusts, our hospital trusts into this is just absolutely fascinating.
I’m going to ask any of the ambassadors if any of this this long, extensive list that we’ve just heard , how will that improve things? How will you be working with that on the coalface, Katie, please come in.
Katie Day
I mean, it’s going to be great for general practices that patients can actually have their appointments within the calendar because they’re more likely to remember that they’ve actually got that appointment there and obviously set a reminder because obviously DNA is quite, quite a big problem within general practice. I mean, the prescription barcode that was transformational coming in because I’ve worked in general practice myself in the past and the to-ing and fro-ing from the patient. You know, they go to the pharmacy. No, it’s not there. Go to your GP. Well, the GP, well, I’ve sent it to your pharmacy, obviously it negates all of that now. So, it’s just fantastic.
James Butcher
Thank you very much, Katie. Lianne, please jump in.
Lianne Jerome
Yeah, it sounds absolutely amazing, James. I really like the fact that you’re going to be able to see your test results and have your previous test results being able to compare on a graph. So that sounds amazing. I don’t want to take you back or add to your list. But when we came across these barriers, I was a previous practice manager and one of our barriers was the booking of appointments online. So you would show appointments through the NHS App and you’d have men bookings smear appointments.
So I think a lot of practices take the fact that you can book online off so that they don’t have a waste of appointments. I wondered whether there was anything coming in that would stop that kind of thing happening and be able to allow the patients and the practice to put have appointments online for the patients because it was a real barrier. Everybody just went I’m not doing it, we’re taking them off and that’s it, we’re done.
James Higgott
Yeah, didn’t want to mention that that particular piece of work (!) because we’re not 100% sure where we’re going with that one at the moment. But it’s a piece that we’re looking at around the whole sort of appointment booking journey we’ve got. We’ve got what we sort of call the direct booking, which is the one you’re referring to there where yeah, we have plenty of stories of people booking smear appointments who aren’t appropriate for smear appointments.
But an awful lot of GP practices also use online consultation services and so actually for many practices there are there are potentially two routes through which you know one of our users might sort of request or sometimes direct book an appointment and it can be a bit confusing having those two options and each one working in different ways and it’s, it’s really difficult to unpick that because without wanting to go massively into, you know, primary care policy, you know different practices work in different ways.
And so trying to have like one common interface that is consistent nationally with every GP practice, you know to a certain extent, doing things their own way is really challenging, but it’s something that we’re looking at. I’m not quite sure where that piece of work is heading at the moment in terms of like what the end result will be.
Lianne Jerome
If you manage to sort that, that will be transformational!
James Higgott
Don’t want to set expectations too high (!)
James Butcher
Good question, Lianne and well answered James. Thank you. Alex, you come into this please.
Alex Mills
Yeah. So just to follow on from that, we have a practice in our area who actually pushed smear clinic appointments out via the app. So they found a template to identify a cohort of patients who, you know, do that test, and they issued that out via their online appointments solution and then it went out via the app and patients were able to use the app to book straight into that, you know, because it’s targeted for those patients specifically. So it’s just a good success story on how you can scale your appointments via the app instead of just using flu clinics.
I’m working with practices to actually consider long term conditions and things like that. So, you’ve got patients who are due to come in rather than send in the usual SMS, I’ll try via the app in the first instance and that’s sort of an attribute to the current solution to default to the app first before pushing out that SMS.
So I do come across a lot of practices who don’t use online appointments at all.
And that’s their reason. You know, you’re getting an inappropriate use of the appointment button system. So it’s just working with them to find out ways in which they can identify patients for different conditions, different non-triage appointments or non-triage conditions or anything like that just to push out via the app.
It’s the same practice who were quite shocked that they had so many patients on the app and the and the, you know, had the notification set on. So, if there’s more messages coming out from the app, if that can be aligned to more appointment types or more consultation types, then that’s great. It’ll be fantastic because if this service is free to the practices and it will do continue moving forward, it’ll be huge.
James Butcher
Thank you very much for that, Alex.
Well, that concludes our NHS App podcast. I hope you will find it really really useful. I’d like to thank my panel as it were of speakers. That’s James H from the national NHS App team and the three, brilliant NHS Ambassadors that are out there locally in the North East and Yorkshire region being advocates of the NHS App.