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Prescription tracking through the NHS App has been used by 394,000 people since its launch in May 2025, according to NHS England.
Almost 1,650 community pharmacies, including every Boots pharmacy in England, are now offering the service, NHS England said on 9 August 2025.
The tracker allows patients to see if their prescriptions are ready to collect, or whether they have been dispatched for home delivery.
“Almost half (45%) of phone calls to community pharmacies were estimated to be from patients asking if their prescription is ready, so the new service is helping to free up time for pharmacists to provide advice to patients”, NHS England said.
The tracking feature launched in May 2025 but had been piloted by a small number of community pharmacies beforehand. In May 2025, NHS England said that almost 5,000 more pharmacies were expected to start offering the service over the next 12 months, which would bring coverage to more than half of pharmacies in England.
Commenting on the figures, Henry Gregg, chief executive of the National Pharmacy Association, said: “The introduction of real-time prescription tracking is a game-changer and if rolled out equitably to all pharmacies, it will encourage greater use of the NHS App.
“In many pharmacies, we’ve seen limited patient uptake of the NHS App, largely because this functionality wasn’t previously available.
“Pharmacies want to do all they can to embrace new technology and make the vital services they offer as easy and convenient as possible for patients to access.
“Anything that allows pharmacies to focus on delivering first-class patient care, rather than spending time on phone calls to provide prescription status updates is welcome news.”
NHS England also said that in the past 12 months, 61.5 million repeat prescriptions had been ordered via the NHS App — a 45.7% increase compared with the previous year (42.2 million).
Community Pharmacy England (CPE) said the feature “is being gradually rolled out nationwide as pharmacy IT suppliers onboard and activate it within their IT systems and across their customers’ pharmacies”. A list of IT suppliers who are working on implementing the functionality is available on the NHS prescription tracking service website, CPE added.
Dan Ah-Thion, IT policy manager at CPE, said: “IT developments like this help improve the flow of communication between GP practices, pharmacies and patients. As more IT suppliers onboard, more pharmacies will be able to use the feature, which should help to ease some of their workload.
“Whilst today the feature provides a simple status check, in the future the introduction of notifications will make it even more useful.”
Claire Anderson, president of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, said it was “encouraging to see almost 400,000 people now using the prescription tracking through the NHS App. This reflects the growing value of digital tools that empower patients to take control of their medicines, while helping pharmacy teams manage their workload more effectively.
“By reducing unnecessary calls and visits, pharmacists have more time to focus on providing expert care and vital services. We hope to see uptake continue to grow so more people and pharmacies can benefit from this.”
