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NHS leaders are urging the public to activate alerts on the official NHS app, following a poll revealing that one in four individuals have missed a health appointment.
The new initiative encourages users to enable ‘push notifications’ to receive timely reminders or facilitate rescheduling, a move anticipated to free up millions of crucial appointments for other patients.
A recent survey of 2,000 patients across England highlighted the scale of the issue, with 12 per cent admitting to having forgotten an appointment, and a further 11 per cent arriving too late.
The problem extends significantly, as NHS England reported 16 million GP appointments went unattended in 2025. This equates to a staggering 4.3 per cent of all appointments – or one in every 23 – effectively representing an entire day’s worth of missed consultations at every GP practice nationwide each month.
The National Health Service (NHS) app displayed on a mobile phone screen (JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
Dr Amanda Doyle, national director for primary care and community services at NHS England, said: “People will often have genuine reasons for not being able to make an appointment or arriving too late, but it’s really important that they let us know if possible so we can offer the appointment to someone else.
“One of the easiest ways you can reduce the risk of missing an appointment is by tapping the NHS app to turn on notifications to get reminders, so you can cancel or rearrange them if they need to.
“It’s fantastic to see that GPs provided more than eight million extra appointments for their patients in 2025, and I hope this new campaign will help increase that number even more in 2026.
“I’d encourage all NHS app users to make the most of what the app has to offer so they never forget an appointment.”
The NHS app has more than 40 million registered users. It also enables people to order repeat prescriptions, and read notes and documents on their health.
The new campaign is called Tap the NHS App.