Monthnote: April 2026
This post was written early May 2026 but not published until mid-May because of the pre-election period.
I navigated a boat through the Blisworth Tunnel (2.8km!), I updated the NHS App public roadmap, and there were some issues with the NHS App.
Incidents
There have been 2 recent incidents affecting the NHS App, both caused by an issue in another system that we rely on:
- On 9 February there was an issue with the Service Search API which stopped NHS App users being able to select a nominated pharmacy while requesting a repeat prescription.
- On 23 April there was an issue with NHS login that stopped people logging into the NHS App for a few hours.
Both were resolved swiftly thanks to the skill and effort of some brilliant colleagues.
These are the 2 biggest (maybe the only?) outages in my time working on the NHS App. We’re learning a lot from them, we’re putting in place safeguards to avoid them happening again, and we’re improving how we respond to something similar in future.
There are 2 things I’m particularly keen to have available for the next time:
- A ‘service unavailable’ page with content that can be updated without a release. Our default error page advised people to try again, but that wasn’t the right advice in this situation. We could have used this page to communicate better — to tell our users what had happened and what they should do about it.
- A way to send a message to affected users after the issue has been fixed. We have a very manual way to do this that can be used for very small numbers of people. We’re now integrating with NHS Notify to be able to send messages to large numbers of our users if required.
The reviews are in
The change to the NHS App’s information architecture (see my March monthnote for more information) was rolled out to all users after the successful trial.
Because this was such a large change we took a closer-than-usual look at ratings and reviews on the Google and Apple app stores. We saw some room for improvement in how we respond to reviews in future — particularly negative reviews where there is a fix for the user’s problem.
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Here’s a fairly typical review from someone who was familiar with the old information architecture and is now struggling with the new:
Where has the “view my GP health records” gone? It is now fairly useless and very difficult to try and find what you are looking for. Please bring that option back!
Previously, we would direct the user to a contact form to raise an issue with the help desk. It’s a better use of everyone’s time though to just advise the user where they can find what they’re looking for in our response to the review. Doing this has sometimes even resulted in some users upgrading their reviews from 1 star to 5.
My cultural highlights of the month
- Around the World in 80 Games — a book about games by Marcus du Sautoy
- Small Prophets — a gentle TV comedy
- The Farthest — a Storyville documentary about the Voyager probes which left Earth in the 1970s and are still travelling through space
- I Am Martin Parr — documentary about the photographer
Some links
- From garbage can to compost heap — Mike Gallagher
- Shitty Maps — Joe Elmedorf
- Morgan Maps — Tom Wynne-Morgan
- Getting approval to spend money on a service — updated guidance on GOV.UK
- One design system is better than 2 — Frankie Roberto and Ananda Maryon
- Becoming everyone’s problem — Mike Gallagher
- Process knowledge — Cory Doctorow
- Project Hail Mary Is a Master Class in Crisis Engineering — Marina Nitze
