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NHS England has said almost 400,000 people in England have used the prescription tracking feature in the NHS app while 1,650 pharmacies have offered it to patients in the 10 weeks since it launched.

The tracking feature allows people to check when their medicines are ready to collect or if they have been dispatched by the pharmacy for delivery to someone’s home.

In a statement at the weekend, NHSE said the tracker has been used 715,000 times by 394,000 people since May, or once every nine seconds, with around 4.4 million people viewing their prescription in the app since its launch.

NHSE also said every Boots branch in the country is offering the tracking service although it is unclear how many independent pharmacies are providing it. Independent Community Pharmacist has asked NHSE for more details.

It said the feature will be made available to nearly 5,000 more pharmacies in the next 12 months “covering 60 per cent of those in England”.

“The prescription tracking feature is just one of many planned improvements to the NHS app which will soon expand to offer patients more appointment options and greater choice as part of the Government’s commitment to put patients in control of their healthcare and reduce waiting lists,” NHSE said.

NPA: Service must be available to all pharmacies, not just multiples

It revealed 45 per cent of phone calls to pharmacies are from patients asking if their prescription is ready and insisted the app and tracker will help “free up time for pharmacists to provide advice to patients”. 

However, National Pharmacy Association chief executive Henry Gregg urged the Government to ensure the service is available to all community pharmacies, not just the multiples.

“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,” he said. “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.

“A number of pharmacies already use tracking apps for prescriptions. 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.”

NHSE said the app has 37.4 million registered users while an average of 11.4 million people log in each month. Some 61.5 million repeat prescriptions have been ordered through the app in the last 12 months, a 46 per cent increase on the previous year when 42.2 million repeat prescriptions were ordered.

NHS also said there were 87.4 million views of patient test results during the same period.

Yasif Salim, a pharmacist at Ryan’s Pharmacy in West Yorkshire, said “the phone would ring constantly” before the tracking feature was introduced, making it “quite stressful and overwhelming” for his team.

“We pride ourselves on our customer service and that means trying our very best not to let a call go unanswered,” he said. “But some nights I went to sleep and dreamt of the phones ringing. And I know that feeling ran across the whole team.”