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Adoption of prescription tracking in the NHS App has “stalled”, a senior NHS England figure has said, as new functionality for the app continues to be rolled out.
Speaking at the Pharmacy Show in Birmingham on 12 October 2026, Rahul Singal, chief pharmacy and medicines information officer at NHS England, told attendees that only 30% of pharmacies currently had functionality enabled that would allow patients to use the NHS App to see whether their prescription was ready to collect.
“We’ve stalled a little bit on adoption there,” he added.
The tracking feature was launched in May 2025, with NHS England saying at the time that 5,000 pharmacies would sign up within a year.
In August 2025, NHS England announced that around 1,650 pharmacies had signed up to allow patients to track their prescriptions via the app.
Singal told delegates that one of the barriers to rollout was a “roadmap or sequencing challenge” for community pharmacy IT providers.
“They have to get on board with [NHS England’s] API to allow tracking to happen, the choice for them is when they do that,” he continued.
Singal also suggested that enabling tracking within the app may not be seen as a priority as pharmacies might have other ways of letting patients know that their prescription was ready, such as sending a text message.
Pharmacies may have different processes around when they notify a patient that their prescription was ready to collect, while some needed to do more work to understand when in their workflow this step would be applied, he noted.
On 12 October 2026, NHS England announced that it was introducing functionality to the NHS App to allow a notification alert to be sent to patients when their prescription was ready, if they have enabled push notifications within the app.
James Frith, health innovation minister, said: “This is a practical example of how digital technology can make a difference to people’s everyday experience of the NHS, while also helping to reduce unnecessary calls and free up valuable time for pharmacy staff to focus on supporting patients.
“Anyone that uses the NHS App should switch on notifications so they can benefit from this brilliant new service.”
Commenting on the introduction of alerts, Henry Gregg, chief executive of the National Pharmacy Association, said: “This is an important step forward in making pharmacy services more accessible, making it easier for patients to access the medicines they need. It also frees up staff time from answering phone calls so they can focus on delivering first class care.”
