April 2026 - Recall Update - New Planner V2.1

Welby Innovate Recall Planner 2026-27 V2.1.xlsx 

Thanks for all your helpful feedback over the last few weeks. We’ve made a few changes as a result… 

• Recall Planner – we’ve updated it (attached) so you can copy and paste from the workplan into the notes (recommend pasting as values) and have recorded a video that talks through setting it up and using it - Welby Innovate Recall Planner
• AR Status – we’ve made some changes to improve the accuracy of the AR recall status and improve alignment with birth month.

Some patients were showing as AR pink (in progress) when they weren’t yet having their annual review. This sometimes had a knock-on impact, advising that all annual review bloods be taken long before birth month. To aid this, we’ve also added a confirmation box when using the AR booking guidance:

We’ve also come across a scenario where a patient might have gone from AR Green at the end of the last QOF year, to AR Red at the start of April. This could occur if a patient needed a cardiovascular review, submitted their BP prior to their main invite last year, and didn’t have any review code added. We’ve fixed the issue but its possible a few patients may have been invited out of sync with their birth month, particularly if a practice was behind on med reviews and using our Proactive Prescribing Checks. We’ve provided a report in the “1 Overview” folder that can be used to review patients who may have been invited out of sync:

• Low BPs – as well as following up raised BPs that patients have submitted, it would be wise to follow up low BPs (<90/60). We’ve added this into our BP module (Blood Pressure) and provided an additional report in the Recall Overview folder: “ADMIN ACTION: BP Submitted by Questionnaire in last 6m - Low (not followed up & not managing using Path module)”

Birth Month queries

Several practices have queried the number of patients showing up for AR invites and visits. It’s very deliberate that the system doesn’t show all patients in each birth month. You can read a lot more about the how and why of this here - How do birth month invites work?. This isn’t a new feature, but it is new to some of you, and it is more pronounced than it used to be.

Around this time last year, some practices encountered patients who were invited but had nothing in the Recall Overview that needed to be done. E.g., a patient who needed annual monitoring but had blood tests in March might not appear to need any blood tests for their annual review if attending in April. To avoid this scenario, we now delay invites for patients who had a blood test between 2.5 months ago and the end of March 2026. This is extended to 5.5m for those practices that work to that time frame for bloods/obs at annual review. We think this is the right approach, but if you have capacity to fill, you can use these folders to invite patients ahead of the normal birth month schedule:

If you do use these, we’d recommend breaking the reports on birth month and selecting appropriate birth months to invite.

Hope these things all help!