NHSDigital · jolumley-nhs · Apr 22, 2026 · Apr 21, 2026 · Apr 22, 2026 · Apr 22, 2026
diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2024/08/what-is-nbs/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2024/08/what-is-nbs/index.md
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ title: What is the national booking service?
 date: 2024-08-15
 tags:
   - appointments
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 ## Vision

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2024/12/rsv-pregnancy-self-referral/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2024/12/rsv-pregnancy-self-referral/index.md
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ title: Designing a pregnancy self-referral journey for RSV
 date: 2024-12-10
 tags:
   - RSV vaccine
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 As part of the RSV expansion we explored the options for adding a route for people who are 28 weeks pregnant or more.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/02/improving-appointment-selection/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/02/improving-appointment-selection/index.md
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 ---
 title: Making the appointment selection process clearer for users
 date: 2025-02-18
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 Our research with National Booking Service (NBS) users had shown that some of our users found the appointment selection process difficult.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/03/exploring-joint-bookings/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/03/exploring-joint-bookings/index.md
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@ date: 2025-03-03
 tags:
   - appointments
   - joint bookings
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 Based on feedback from NBS public users, and requirements for expansion to the service to drive increased uptake of vaccines, we explored options for enabling booking for 2 people for spring 2025.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/04/improving-booking-complete-screen/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/04/improving-booking-complete-screen/index.md
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 ---
 title: Improving the booking complete screen
 date: 2025-04-24
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 After the introduction of the panel component to the NHS design system, we took the opportunity to make improvements to our booking complete screens.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/05/improving-location-search/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/05/improving-location-search/index.md
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ title: Making it easier for users to find somewhere to book an appointment
 date: 2025-05-22
 tags:
   - appointments
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 We spent some time during early 2025 exploring how to improve the site search feature within NBS.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/06/mvp-confirmation-page/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/06/mvp-confirmation-page/index.md
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@ date: 2025-06-17
 tags:
   - appointments
   - continuous improvement
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 We found during research that some users find the end of the booking journey a little sudden.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/06/proxy-users/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/06/proxy-users/index.md
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ title: Enabling users to book for other people
 date: 2025-06-30
 tags:
   - appointments
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 For the autumn/winter 2025 campaign, the team was asked to include flu vaccinations for 2 and 3 year olds.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/10/improving-date-selection/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/10/improving-date-selection/index.md
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@ date: 2025-10-02
 tags:
   - appointments
   - continuous improvement
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 Our analytics on the National Booking Service (NBS) showed that 25% of users were clicking ‘show later dates’ when trying to find a suitable date for their appointment in NBS. 

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/11/improving-contact-details/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/11/improving-contact-details/index.md
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@ date: 2025-11-03
 tags:
   - appointments
   - accessibility
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 The feedback from an accessibility audit on the National Booking Service (NBS) told us the way we collect contact details on NBS was not very accessible.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/11/preparing-for-aw/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/11/preparing-for-aw/index.md
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@ date: 2025-11-26
 tags:
   - appointments
   - continuous improvement
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 As part of our preparation for the Autumn-winter 2025 flu and COVID campaigns, we’ve added some new features and made some improvements to the Book a vaccination journey.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/12/119-ur/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/12/119-ur/index.md
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ tags:
   - appointments
   - assisted digital routes
   - telephone booking
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 The Book a vaccination service (NBS) offers a telephone booking service, via 119. Users who cannot or do not want to book using the online service can call to book an appointment. 119 call handlers use a version of the online booking system to book appointments for callers.

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/12/pop-up-ur/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/12/pop-up-ur/index.md
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ tags:
   - appointments
   - research
   - in person research
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 During summer 2025 we ran some pop-up, in-person user research sessions. We wanted to reach and test the Book a vaccination service (NBS) with groups who are often under-represented, including:

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/12/responding-to-insights/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2025/12/responding-to-insights/index.md
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@ tags:
   - user feedback
   - content
   - iterations
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 The autumn-winter 2025 season for Flu and COVID-19 saw more than 5 million appointments booked using the online booking service. We've used analytics data, survey feedback and user research to identify ways to help people use the Book a vaccination service (NBS).

diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/cancelled-bookings.png b/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/cancelled-bookings.png
diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/expired-bookings.png b/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/expired-bookings.png
diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/index.md
@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@
+---
+title: Improving the booking retrieval process
+date: 2026-04-21
+tags:
+  - appointments
+  - managing appointments
+author: Jo Lumley
+---
+
+During the autumn/winter 2025 season, we got feedback from our users that finding their bookings when they wanted to change or cancel them was difficult and frustrating.  Users were frustrated that they had to give us all their personal information again, when they had provided this when initially making their booking.
+
+Often when users were searching for bookings, they saw this screen:
+
+![screenshot showing the booking not matched page](match-failure.png)
+
+This screen would appear when:
+
+- users had entered the wrong reference number
+- users had entered some of their personal details incorrectly when trying to find the booking
+- the booking had been cancelled (for any reason)
+- the booking was in the past (expired) 
+
+Because the ‘we cannot find any details’ screen would appear for several different reasons, users did not understand where they had made an error when searching for their booking.  If a booking was cancelled or expired, it meant that the screen was appearing for some users even though they had put the correct details in.
+
+It also meant that we couldn’t use analytics or survey data to determine if users were making errors, or were searching for expired or cancelled appointments.
+
+## What we did 
+
+We explored several different ways to improve the booking process, and also improve our analytics data around this. 
+
+### Making it easier for users to find bookings 
+
+To match a booking in NBS, we need users to enter their:
+
+- booking reference number
+- name
+- NHS number or postcode
+- date of birth  
+
+Requiring this much information to match a booking makes it time consuming and frustrating for users to try again when they have not found their booking.
+
+> I had to enter a booking reference which clearly recognises my existing appointment yet the system requires a lot of information to be re-entered even though you already have it. Why can't it be displayed simply for confirmation?
+
+> Needed to change an appointment. Put in reference number. Even so, still had to put in ALL the info as for original booking. This is unnecessary. Time wasting.
+
+We reduced the amount of information needed to find a booking to:
+
+- reference number
+- date of birth
+
+This should make it much easier for users to recover and try again if they did enter incorrect details.
+
+### Showing cancelled and expired bookings
+
+We also explored the idea of showing a screen to let users know if the booking they were trying to find had been cancelled or had expired (was in the past).  This should reduce the amount of users who see a screen telling them their booking cannot be found, even if they’ve entered the correct booking details.
+
+#### Cancelled bookings
+
+We’ll show a dynamic screen for cancelled bookings, that shows the cancellation reason, and provides a link to re-book if NBS cannot detect that the person has been vaccinated.
+
+![screenshots showing the 3 cancelled bookings screens](cancelled-bookings.png)
+
+#### Expired bookings
+
+We’ll show a dynamic screen for expired bookings, with slightly different content based on whether the expired booking is in the current season, or an earlier season.  For expired bookings in the current season, we’ll include a link to re-book if NBS cannot detect that the person has been vaccinated.
+
+![screenshots showing the 2 expired bookings screens](expired-bookings.png)
+
+### Helping users enter reference numbers correctly
+
+We looked at multiple methods to help users enter reference numbers correctly.
+
+We added hint text to help users understand how to enter the reference number correctly, including an example of the reference number format.  We talked about that change in a [previous post about responding to insights]([link to the prev post](/book-a-vaccination/2025/12/responding-to-insights/)). We added an error message to help users enter the number in the correct format.
+
+![screenshot showing the reference number screen with error message for incorrect format](ref-no-error.png)
+
+We also added some post-input formatting, where we can insert the hyphens in the correct places if users haven’t entered them.  This gives users more flexibility on how to enter their reference number.
+
+## Next steps
+
+We implemented the improved booking matching using only reference number and date of birth in February.  The booking reference validation was released in December 20256.  We’re planning to release the cancelled and expired booking screens later in 2026.
+
+We plan to monitor our survey feedback, and we expect to see a reduction in negative feedback relating to finding existing bookings.  We also plan to use our analytics data to determine how many users are seeing the cancelled and expired booking screens.
+
+Having this data should tell us if there are lots of users searching for cancelled or expired bookings, and it will also help us to reflect on our feedback from autumn-winter 2025, and understand if the negative feedback we saw was driven by users not being able to see cancelled or expired bookings.
diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/match-failure.png b/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/match-failure.png
diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/ref-no-error.png b/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/improving-booking-retrieval/ref-no-error.png
diff --git a/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/preparing-for-end-of-season/index.md b/app/book-a-vaccination/2026/preparing-for-end-of-season/index.md
@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ description: How we got ready to close the flu and COVID services
 tags:
   - appointments
   - seasonal changes
+author: Jo Lumley
 ---
 
 The beginning of 2026 saw the flu and COVID-19 services close for the autumn-winter season.  COVID-19 closed on 31 January 2026, and flu closed on 31 March 2026.