Check you can use NHS Notify - What you need before you start

Organisation type and funding

You must:

• be funded, directly or indirectly, by the NHS or NHS England
• have funding or a budget agreed for sending messages

Message types and content

You can only use NHS Notify if your organisation or service sends:

• event-based messages
• direct messages
• messages that are part of a campaign

You must also:

• intend to only send communications to patients or other members of the public – NHS Notify cannot be used to message NHS staff
• not use NHS Notify to send marketing communications
• check if other organisations or teams within the NHS are already sending messages about the same subject matter

If you intend to add links in NHS App messages

Your organisation must onboard with NHS login if your message links to a service that requires users to sign in.

This keeps users logged in so they do not have to enter their details again.

Commercial and data

You must:

• have a way to get the NHS numbers of your recipients
• be prepared to sign a connection agreement (if your organisation is part of NHS England)
• be prepared to sign our memorandum of understanding (if your organisation is not part of NHS England)

Technical preparation

You must have a developer or a technical team to build your integration with NHS Notify.

You must also decide how you want to integrate with NHS Notify. You can integrate through either:

• NHS Notify API
• NHS Notify MESH

If you’re integrating through NHS Notify API, you can try our sandbox test environment for early developer testing (opens in a new tab).

Next step

If you meet all these criteria, you now need to make sure you’re ready commercially.