NHS: Correspondence

Whilst there is an increasing move towards digital National Health Service communications via the NHS App, texts, digital telephony, and emails, NHS letters remain crucial for many patients, particularly those who may be digitally excluded.

All NHS organisations are now required to use NHS Notify to send out patient communications. This service makes sure that patients get messages from NHS organisations in the best channel for their needs and ensures the NHS effectively delivers its services. This is done by routing messages to the secure NHS App, falling back to SMS, email, and letters if they do not, based on a central source of contact details, additional needs, and NHS numbers. By doing this once from a single service, the NHS can make sure the most secure, rapid, reliable, accessible, and cost effective channel of communication is used.

NHS England and Royal Mail have been working together to ensure NHS providers continue to have a choice of both price and speed when sending letters, and to improve how NHS letters are sent to patients across the United Kingdom. There is now a Royal Mail NHS barcode, which was announced in April 2025. The barcode is designed to mitigate the impact on NHS letters by helping to optimise their delivery at times of local and national disruption. Further information may be found on the Royal Mail website, at the following link:

https://www.royalmailwholesale.com/news/nhs-mail-new-barcode-solution

This describes the process by which the prioritisation of NHS communication happens.