Monthnote: March 2026

This post was written mid-April 2026 but not published until mid-May because of the pre-election period.

In my world, March is the end of the financial year. So it’s also the deadline for many of the things we committed to deliver. Spring is the season of birth and renewal. Ducklings are hatching, daffodils are blooming, bees are awakening and digital projects are coming to fruition and benefitting their first users.

That will all be documented on the NHS App public roadmap once it has been updated following the pre-election period.

Global navigation

The most obvious change that you can see in the NHS App is our new information architecture.

Navigation has been simplified to just ‘Home’ (key services), ‘Messages’ (inbox) and ‘Profile’ (account, personal details, app settings).

The early results have been good — people are finding and accessing the most popular services more easily and in greater numbers.

There has been some negative feedback too. Some regular users have struggled to find the ‘consultations and events’ part of their GP health record, and have told us about this in app store reviews. We’re adding signposting and updating help and support content to help them find this in its new location.

At the time of writing the new information architecture is available to about 50% of users for real-world testing and snagging, but it will soon be made available to all.

Quarterly planning

In a beautiful piece of synchronicity, NHS App Quarterly Planning fell across the final day of the old financial year and the first day of the new one.

The format was a repeat of the previous one — it really is a well-oiled process now — but there were still a few challenges and changes to note.

This was the start of new period under the 10 Year Health Plan, Medium Term Planning Framework and 2025 Spending Review. But it’s not like we’re starting with a blank slate — we have a mature product to run and maintain, an established set of capabilities and millions of monthly users. In some respects, 1 April is a fresh start under a new set of strategic priorities. It’s also a continuation and evolution of what’s already gone before. Communicating this, and translating the NHS’s strategic priorities into tangible goals for the NHS App team was a tricky challenge.

I also had a longer-than-usual queue of people asking me to make their project a priority for product teams. I suspect this is a consequence of NHS App Quarterly Planning becoming better known as the place where teams’ priorities get decided. It’s not an issue dealing with these requests — it’s a key part of my role — but it’s worth keeping an eye on in case it becomes unmanageable.

Finally, I abandoned the “Must, should, could” language from previous rounds of Quarterly Planning. They had felt like a useful way to talk about the group of most-important priorities and the group of next-most-important priorities, and so on. But it didn’t quite work out. The approach I’ve tried this time is to

My cultural highlights of the month

• Yin Xiuzhen’s Heart to Heart (joyous) and Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life (creepy) at the Hayward Gallery
• Deutsche Börse Photography Prize at the Photographers’ Gallery
• Cardiacs at Brixton Electric
• Richard Dawson’s Delight Is Right evening at the Barbican — I really enjoyed finally being able to see him and Circle do their thing
• Project Hail Mary
• Series 2 of The Bear

Some links

• Miscellanea: The War in Iran — Bret Devereux
• Getting approval to spend money on a service and the Digital Assurance Playbook — new guidance on spend controls and assurance on GOV.UK
• Attitudes to technology and AI in health care — The Health Foundation
• When Software Becomes Cheap, Strategy Becomes Everything — Martin Eriksson
• Palantir in the NHS — is it actually any good? — Rory Cellan-Jones
• HSJ Podcast: Bob Wachter on healthcare’s AI revolution