Referrals and appointments newsletter June 2026

Thank you to those providers who submitted bids for our 2026/27 national funding. We are now working with regional colleagues to review and approve priority bids, and expect to release the first tranche of funding for successful applicants from July.

This edition also includes an update on the e-RS delivery plan, the impact of patient-initiated follow-up via the NHS App at Rotherham, and an ask from the NHS Notify team for provider volunteers to support new messaging best practice guides.

And, as ever, we cover our recent trust go lives in the NHS App and latest dashboard data, as well as upcoming national events and refreshed guidance and resources on FutureNHS.

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 with supplier Netcall on 10 December, with patients on continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) PIFU pathways, Rotherham is now live in 16 specialties overall, representing 96.5% of their total PIFU volume, allowing up to 6,800 patients to manage their PIFU via the NHS App at any one time.

In a survey of 158 patients on a PIFU pathway over April/May, 95% are satisfied overall with the feature, 87% recognised its ease of use, and 92% are likely to continue using the NHS App.

Learn more about digital PIFU on FutureNHS.

Recent NHS trust go-lives in the NHS App.

London

Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust – Core Features, Notifications and Messaging (N&M), Paperless Preferences, Document and Questionnaire Manager (DQM

North East & Yorkshire

Bradford Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust - N&M (for letters), Documents,
Paperless Preferences, DQM

South East

Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust - Questionnaires, N&M (for Questionnaires), DQM

Our 2026/27 national funding offers process closed for bids on 31 May 2026. 

We received over 280 bids in total across the different funding offers. Regional teams have reviewed bids and are meeting with the national team to discuss and approve priority bids.

All applicants will be notified on the outcome of their bids by the national team by the end of June/early July 2026.

Note that all information and documentation is hosted on FutureNHS.

Colleagues working in secondary care who are involved in planning, writing, or sending patient communications are invited to take part in an informal 45-minute research session to help improve NHS messaging to patients. This will include sharing your experience of messaging patients, what works well, and any challenges you face, and review current guidance that the NHS provides to support staff in messaging and suggest improvements.

Sessions are running now to early July 2026 - for more information and to sign up email [email protected].

Following provider concerns on the pace and complexity of the proposed changes, NHS England has decided to postpone the planned Advice and Guidance (A&G) module upgrade and to prioritise the upgrades to the Directory of Services (DoS) naming conventions and the Single Point of Access (SPoA) functionality (regional directors were informed on 19 June 2026). Further communications on how this will be implemented will follow. The expansion and delivery of A&G services should continue using existing established methods to meet the commitments in the medium-term planning framework. Contact is: [email protected].

NHS England is working towards the implementation of a standardised naming convention for all e-RS services on the e-RS Directory of Services (DoS).

This will require all organisations to review and update their services on their DoS to ensure they are appropriately aligned with the new speciality and clinic types. The most recent e-RS update (which took place on 23 June 2026) introduced the DoS mapping tool enabling service definers to map their services to the new specialty and clinic types.

Service definer users should review further information and guidance in the e-RS news article.

Referrals and Appointments Reference Group - 16 June and 21 July 2026 FutureNHS

e-Referral Service (e-RS) Overview sessions - 24 June, 30 June and 2 July 2026

e-RS Training Forum - 15 July 2026

Join our FutureNHS workspace.

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