What will the Patient Engagement Portal do?

Digital letters and appointment reminders

From May of this year, you will be able to view your Outpatient appointments and associated letters as soon as they’re scheduled in the Portal. That means no more waiting for the postman to arrive or worrying about losing paper letters.

We know sometimes sending multiple appointment letters is unavoidable, but we also know it can be very confusing for you, and expensive for us using all that paper! In the Portal, you’ll be able to see all your appointment letters in one place, in order of when they were sent (with the most recent at the top).

This should make receiving different appointments easier to manage, making it clear when you need to attend your appointments, and will drastically reduce the number of letters we need to print.

If you’re not able to use digital letters, or you don’t want to stop receiving paper letters, you needn’t do anything – they’ll continue to be sent in paper format as normal.

NHS App

At the moment, the NHS App allows you to keep track of your vaccinations, order repeat prescriptions, manage GP appointments, get health information and advice, view your NHS Number and access your GP health record securely. We’re working on the ability to access some of the features of our Patient Engagement Portal via the NHS App.

Think of the NHS App a bit like the front door to all Gloucestershire healthcare services; for us, our Portal is what’s behind it.

If you’d like to learn more about the NHS App, visit the NHS website here.

We plan to have our Portal working with the NHS App around Summer of this year, so if you haven’t already, download the app, enable notifications and keep checking back here for updates!

Appointment management

We know that life isn’t always able to be scheduled, and often things need to change – sometimes at the last minute. The Portal will enable you to reschedule an appointment, or submit a cancellation request if you no longer require it.

If you use the Portal, you won’t need to call the department, as you’ll receive confirmation of your new appointment or cancellation on your device.

By making cancellation and rescheduling easier for you, we can offer these short-notice appointments to other patients, allowing everyone the opportunity to be seen as quickly as possible.

We expect this functionality to be rolled out later this year in a gradual way, so we'll keep you posted on progress!

2-way messaging

Currently, if we want to contact you about your care, we can only really do so by telephone or in special cases, text or email. The Patient Engagement Portal equips us to send secure messages directly to you, so we could offer you a sooner appointment or provide advice and guidance in advance of an appointment or after a surgery. You can also reply to these messages, to accept the appointment offered, or ask questions.

This functionality has a multitude of ways it could be used, and we are still determining the best use for getting the most from it. That’s why we expect this to be available for some of our services towards the end of this year, with more services taking up use in 2025.

Clinical assessments

We all know how much time it can take to fill out assessments prior to treatment, and much of the time you need to be with us in the hospital in order to do so. However, for many services, these assessment forms could be completed before you arrive at the hospital, speeding things up for you and your care team.

The Portal will provide the ability to do just that. Where it's deemed safe and sensible for you to do so, you'll receive an invitation to complete your assessment via the Portal, where you’ll fill out all the required information from the comfort of your home. When you press ‘submit’, this information will be shared instantly with your care team, ready for your arrival at the hospital.

At the moment, this functionality is estimated to be available next year, but we’ll complete a pilot before rolling out to all our services.