Referrals and appointments newsletter January 2026

The new year is a busy period for Referrals and Appointments. This quarter, we are working to deliver government priorities and outcomes as set out in the NHS Elective Reform Plan and Operational Planning Guidance for 2025/26. This includes specific targets that by March 2026, all NHS acute and specialist acute trusts are connected to the NHS App, and at least 70% of appointments are available for patients to view and manage via the app.

Our main focus is on helping providers reduce waiting times, in the context of meeting further March targets of 65% of patients waiting less than 18 weeks for elective treatment nationally, and for every trust to deliver a minimum 5 percentage point improvement.

We will also be supporting the system to optimise referrals using Advice and Guidance (A&G), with the e-Referral Service (e-RS) to be used for all primary care A&G requests from July 2026.

And finally, we will be soon be publishing our Referrals and Appointments strategy 2026-30, which will set out how we will move towards one national referrals and appointments service, and explain how we will help reduce waiting times, save money, and free up staff and system time.

The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust is the first trust in England to integrate patient initiated follow-up (PIFU) into the NHS App, enabling patients to request follow-up care via the app when it’s needed.

Since launching on 10 December 2025 for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) patients, the service has received 37 digital PIFU requests (one-third via the app), alongside 2 million visits to the PIFU app section.

After adopting non-digital PIFU 4 years ago, annual review waiting times fell from up to 2 years to zero at Rotherham, with 115 fewer appointments required weekly. This enabled mandatory annual reviews to be removed, allowing clinicians to focus on patients who most need support. Now available in the app, PIFU is expected to deliver further benefits by giving patients a simpler, accessible way to manage their follow-up care.

More details on the recent release are available on the Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust website. To learn more about digital PIFU see FutureNHS (log in required).

123 NHS trusts live in the NHS App, with 94 of these trusts live with additional app features.

Recent go lives

London

Barts - Core features, Notifications and Messaging (N&M), Questionnaires, Document and Questionnaire Manager (DQM)

East London - N&M

North London - N&M

North East and Yorkshire

Doncaster - N&M

South West

Dorset - N&M, Documents, Questionnaires, DQM

e-Referral Service (e-RS) major incident update

A priority 1 incident has impacted the e-RS since 30 December 2025. This incident resulted in intermittent performance degradation, including slow response times and some users being unable to log into the e-RS application at times of high traffic during working hours. It has not led to referrals or appointments being lost. Following overnight fixes on 7 January 2026, the service has remained stable with no service interruptions. There is now a period of heightened monitoring to ensure continued service stability. A full and comprehensive post incident review will commence shortly. If you have any questions, email [email protected].

NHS App campaign

A national NHS App marketing and communications campaign is due to kick off on 19 January and run to the end of March. There is going to be a focus on managing repeat prescriptions and enabling notifications and messaging, including for appointment management, and a range of channels utilised including radio, socials and search. An update on the national campaign is due at this month’s reference group meeting.

We have updated the patient engagement portal (PEP) supplier feature matrices for NHS acute and specialist acute trusts, and have developed a new version for NHS mental health trusts. These will provide greater clarity on the NHS App features offered by our PEP partners. The matrices are available on FutureNHS (log in required). They will be regularly updated to reflect developments and feature enhancements as they are introduced by suppliers. If you have any questions, email [email protected].

Referrals and Appointments Reference Group - 20 January 2026.

Referrals and Appointments Supplier Forum - 10 February 2026 (FutureNHS log in required).

e-Referral Service (e-RS) Training Forum - 10 February 2026 interim meeting (to be confirmed) and 10 March 2026.

Access guidance on our services, demos, resources and promotional guidance to support trust and patient communications.

The latest statistics on our trust coverage, service usage, benefits and outcomes.

Find out more about e-RS and A&G.

Contact us at: [email protected]