Patients registered with London GP practices can now start their own Universal Care Plans through the NHS App.
The service is powered by Better and delivered in partnership with OneLondon.
A Universal Care Plan, or UCP, records a person’s health and care wishes, preferences and support needs so authorised professionals can consider them when providing care.
The update gives millions of Londoners the ability to record their wishes and preferences directly, supporting greater patient choice and more personalised care.
Patients can share information about their daily lives, support needs and other details they consider important, helping professionals tailor care to their circumstances.
They can also view clinical sections completed by healthcare professionals, providing greater transparency over what is recorded about their health.
Tomas Ince, senior clinical transformation manager at OneLondon, said: “It’s a huge milestone that every person registered with a London GP practice now has the opportunity to create and edit a care plan.
“The Universal Care Plan has been co-designed with patients and clinicians, capturing important information that matters most, often including very complex personal needs. It opens up that more in-depth personalised picture of a patient, beyond just a list of diagnoses.”
The system is intended to reduce the need for people to repeat their story when receiving care from different services.
Professionals working in primary care, emergency care and social care can access the information through their electronic record systems, the London Care Record and, nationally, the National Record Locator.
Patients can add and update non-clinical information in their own words at any point during their care.
Better and OneLondon said this could reduce administrative work for health and care professionals and improve coordination between services.
They said it could also free NHS resources, reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and create more capacity for elective procedures, while supporting the 10 Year Health Plan’s aims for personalised care and patient choice.
The UCP follows the NHS App design system and is compatible with screen readers and keyboard navigation.
An early adopter network of 14 GP practices is now working directly with patients to encourage use of the feature.
Some practices are supporting uptake through social prescribing, where patients are connected with community activities and non-medical support.
Others are inviting older patients living with moderate frailty to complete their plans at their GP practices. Frailty describes reduced physical resilience that can make it harder to recover from illness or injury.
There are more than 97,000 live care plans, which are viewed around 30,000 times each month.
According to programme figures, 70 per cent of end-of-life patients with a UCP achieved their preferred place of death, compared with a national average of between 50 and 55 per cent.
Unplanned hospital admissions among these patients were reported at 30 per cent, compared with a national average of 46 per cent.
The platform has also expanded beyond end-of-life and palliative care to support people with sickle cell disease, learning disabilities, dementia and frailty.
Better and OneLondon plan to introduce proxy access for linked users, such as parents and carers.
They also plan to integrate the service with NHS Notify and add features covering mental health crisis management, catheter care and complex geriatric assessments.
A complex geriatric assessment is a detailed review of an older person’s medical, psychological, social and functional needs.
Londoners have been able to view their UCP through the NHS App and its login service since January 2024.
Ian Bennett, senior product specialist at Better, said: “Enabling patients to directly write their own Universal Care Plans in the NHS App accelerates the path towards a more personalised health and care system.
“The Universal Care Plan is about ensuring that patients’ wishes and preferences are accessible to the right clinicians at the right time.
“We’re proud to have delivered a solution that gives patients agency and a voice across all of London.”
