How the National Patient Prescription Tracking service works

This service allows users to track all one-off (acute) and repeat prescriptions sent via the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS). This includes EPS prescriptions sent from all care settings beyond general practice such as community health services, 111 integrated urgent care and health and justice services. EPS is also being rolled out to secondary care hospitals and community pharmacy independent prescribing sites.

Currently, electronic repeat dispensing (eRD) prescriptions, cancelled prescriptions, and post-dated prescriptions (until they reach their effective date) are not available to view or track in the NHS App.

NHS England has worked with pharmacy IT system suppliers to map the trigger points in their dispensing systems that correlate to prescription statuses in the App. NPPTS uses a combination of patient prescriptions status update (PSU) data from pharmacy IT system suppliers and EPS statuses to determine which item and prescription level status should be displayed to a user in the App.

It has been designed to seamlessly work in the background without requiring any additional actions from the pharmacy sites to trigger status updates.

We recommend that pharmacy IT system suppliers clearly inform their pharmacies about which actions will trigger NHS App updates for users. This information can be provided through training guides or user documentation.

Currently users are not notified of their prescription status updates – they will need to go into the App to check the progress of their prescriptions. In September 2025, NHS England plan to pilot a push-notification to inform App users when prescriptions are ready to collect as an enhancement to the service.

NHS App users will see a prescription status at both prescription level and at item level. Please see Appendices 1 and 2 for detailed information on how EPS and dispensing IT item level statuses are mapped to provide prescription and item level statuses to the App user.

Prescriptions will be visible for 36 days from when the EPS Prescription Status '0008 Claimed' has been updated. The prescription will be moved from ‘Your approved prescriptions’ to the ‘Past prescriptions’ screen in the App 7 days after a prescription has been collected or dispatched for delivery.

Prescriptions will be ordered by date on the ‘Past prescriptions’ screen with the most recently collected or dispatched prescriptions at the top of the screen.

If users experience issues, report this to the National Service Desk (NSD). 

Telephone: 0300 303 5035

Email: [email protected].

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