What will the Patient Portal do?
Over the next couple of years (2024–2025) we're introducing lots of capabilities for our Patient Portal, transforming how we interact with you and improving your Outpatient experience.
Digital letters and appointment reminders
You can view your Outpatient appointments and associated letters as soon as they’re scheduled in the Portal. You’ll be able to see all your appointment letters, in order of when they were sent (with the most recent at the top).
This will make it clearer about when you need to attend your appointments, whilst reducing 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.
You might already be used to receiving appointment reminders via text from us – we've had this service set up in some of our services for a while. However, moving to a new messaging process means they're linked to the Patient Portal. This means you're able to view all your appointment details and associated letters in our Patient Portal.
If you need to talk to someone about an upcoming appointment, please call the number on your appointment letter.
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 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.
Learn more about the NHS App.
Appointment management
Our Patient 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 in late 2024.
Quick questions
The quick question feature allows us to ask you and other patients a simple question to help us manage waiting lists, appointments, or gather important information. Here's how it works:
- Simple responses: You’ll receive a question that you can answer with a simple ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ or ‘Unsure.’
- Who gets asked: Questions can be asked of any specific patient group. This is one question asked of the patient with 3 potential answers of Yes, No or Unsure.
Examples of questions we might ask:
- Are you able to attend your planned surgical procedure
- Do you still wish to remain on our waitlist
- Would you like to accept a short notice cancellation appointment
This tool is designed to make communication easier and more efficient, ensuring we have the most up-to-date information to support your care.
Coming soon
Rescheduling appointments
This is due to be live from April 2025.
Excluded patient groups and specialties will include Paediatrics, Palliative care, Oncology, Haematology, Brain injury and Maternity.
Clinical assessments
For many services, assessment forms could be completed before you arrive at the hospital, speeding things up for you and your care team.
Our Patient Portal will provide the ability to do just that. Where appropriate, you'll receive an invitation to complete your assessment via the Portal, where you’ll fill out all the required information from home. When you submit this information, it'll be shared with your care team.
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.
News on Patients Know Best
The Trust is now engaged in a new project with Patients Know Best who are delivering the clinical functionality in our patient portal.
This provides patients with their own patient health record that they can access and add to with their own updates.
More on this to come in the future of our planned roll out, follow the links below to find out more:
Roadmap of future capability to be added to the patient portal.
Learn more about the Patient Portal
Further questions?
If you have further questions or you’d like to talk to someone about the Patient Portal, please feel free to ask a question here, and someone will get back to you.
Please note that we are unable to answer any questions about your care via this method and will only reply to questions relating to the Patient Portal.