A high-level history of major changes to the Signposting Toolkit.

Baseline Platform (as of January 2026)

The following core capabilities are established and available to all surgeries:

• Signposting Toolkit — Symptom library with 200+ base symptoms, local overrides, and custom symptom creation
• Appointment Directory — Searchable catalogue of local services and appointment types
• Clinical Review Workflow — Mandatory draft/approved lifecycle with audit metadata for all symptom changes
• Multi-surgery Tenancy — Complete data isolation between practices with independent configurations
• Role-based Access Control — Three-level hierarchy: Superuser / Surgery Admin / Standard user
• Feature Flags System — Per-surgery and per-user feature enablement
• Universal Navigation — Shared app shell with slide-out navigation panel across all modules
• Preferences System — User preferences for card styles, quick-scan mode, header layouts, and high-risk button selection
• High-risk Flags and Highlighting — Automatic colour-coding for urgent phrases and high-risk symptoms
• AI Instruction Editor — AI-powered tools to improve instruction clarity (feature-flagged, requires clinical review)
• AI Suggested Questions — Generates grouped triage-style questions (feature-flagged, requires clinical review)
• Engagement Tracking — Usage analytics for symptoms and features

v1.7 — Current Release (July 2026)

New

• Click an image to view it full-screen, then zoom in: images in appointment notes, symptom instructions and Practice Handbook pages can now be clicked to open full-screen. The image opens fitted to your screen and can be zoomed up to 6x — with the + / − buttons, the scroll wheel, a pinch on a phone or tablet, or a double-click — and dragged to move around. This matters most on appointment cards, where the card width leaves an inserted image too small to read, and on phones, where a wide diagram needs zooming to be legible at all. Close with Esc, a click on the background, or the close button; the viewer is fully keyboard-operable (tab to an image and press Enter, then +, − and 0). Available to everyone, not just admins. See Appointment Directory.
• Misdirected suggestions can now be passed to your practice: the suggestion form no longer pre-selects a destination — the form only appears once you’ve chosen who your message is for, with your practice’s own teams listed first, so requests meant for your practice stop landing with the toolkit developers. And when one does slip through, the Signposting team can now redirect it to your practice’s toolkit administrators: it appears on their Suggestions tab marked “Redirected from the toolkit team”, and the submitter sees a “Passed to your practice’s administrators” badge and a short note on their My suggestions page. See Feedback & Suggestions.
• Rich-text notes and images in the Appointment Directory: appointment notes now use the same rich-text editor as symptom instructions and the Practice Handbook — admins can format notes with headings, lists and links, and insert JPG/PNG images (up to 2MB) with optional alt text and resizing. Images are private to the practice and appear on the appointment’s card. Note that CSV imports still write plain-text notes and replace rich formatting on the entries they update. See Appointment Directory.
• Share practice content with every practice: system administrators can now push a practice’s excellent work up into the shared library — Update base to match replaces a base symptom’s shared content with a practice’s customised version, and Promote to shared library turns a practice-created symptom into a shared one. Promoted symptoms start disabled for every other practice and appear in their Symptom Library’s Available folder with a green New badge, ready to adopt in one click. See Symptom Library.
• AI customisation on adoption: when a practice adopts a newly promoted symptom and has AI customisation enabled, it is offered the option to have AI adapt the instructions to the practice immediately, based on its onboarding questionnaire. The result goes to Clinical Review before staff see it.
• Resizable images: images inserted into symptom instructions or Practice Handbook pages can now be resized — select the image and choose Small, Medium, Large, or Original size from the editor toolbar.
• Multiple related-symptom links: a symptom is no longer limited to one “Link to Related Symptom” — editors can now add up to 10 links using a search-as-you-type picker in the Customise All Fields dialog. The symptom page shows one button per link in the Related Information panel, and cards show the first link with a “+N more” hint. Practices customising a base symptom can keep the standard links, replace them, or clear them entirely for their surgery. See Symptom Library.
• Images in symptom instructions: the same inline-image support recently added to the Practice Handbook now works in the signposting module — editors can insert JPG/PNG images (up to 2MB) into symptom instructions and age-group variants via the editor toolbar, with optional alt text. Images on base symptoms are visible to every practice; images on a practice’s own customisations or practice-created symptoms are private to that practice. Image edits go through clinical review like any other instruction change. See Symptom Library.
• PDF attachments on Practice Handbook items: alongside link attachments, handbook editors can now upload a PDF (up to 4MB) directly to an item’s Attachments section — the document is stored with the practice’s handbook content, opens in the browser’s PDF viewer, and is served only to signed-in surgery members, respecting category visibility rules. Uploaded PDFs can also be linked from a page’s intro text or additional notes. See Practice Handbook.
• Images in Practice Handbook pages: handbook editors can now insert JPG/PNG images (up to 2MB) into a page’s intro text and additional notes via a new image button in the editor toolbar, with optional alt text for screen readers. Images are private to the practice — served only to signed-in surgery members and respecting category visibility rules. See Practice Handbook.
• Smart visual refinements: editors can now steer a smart visual with a short instruction (e.g. “group by site”) when regenerating, reorder or remove sections in the preview before saving, and print just the visual for the noticeboard with a new Print visual button. Regenerations now keep the previous structure wherever the content still supports it, and saving an edit to a page that has a visual immediately offers one-click regeneration. See Practice Handbook.
• Practice Handbook smart visuals: handbook editors can now click Generate smart visual on any handbook page to have AI turn its content into a polished, infographic-style view — contact cards, numbered steps, checklists, buddy pairings, role cards, key-fact tiles and warning callouts — rendered as real, selectable, accessible app content (not an image). Editors review a preview before saving; staff then get a Standard / Smart visual toggle on the page. The page content remains the source of truth: if it is edited later, the visual is automatically hidden until an editor regenerates it (feature-flagged — contact us to enable). See Practice Handbook.
• Clearer suggestion routing: the suggestion form now starts by asking who your message is for — the Signposting Toolkit team (features, improvements, bugs), your practice’s toolkit administrators (local guidance and symptom content), or your practice’s management or clinical team. It states exactly who will receive your message before you write it, and if your question is really for your own practice’s managers or clinical leads it explains that this form can’t reach them and to contact them directly instead. Local guidance suggestions no longer e-mail the central team — they surface to the practice’s own admins via the pending-count badge on their Suggestions tab. See Feedback & Suggestions.
• Never miss a response to your suggestion: when the Signposting team responds, a “new” badge with the number of unread responses now appears next to My suggestions in the navigation menu, and answered suggestions are highlighted with a New response badge on the My suggestions page until you’ve read them.
• In-app feedback & suggestions: anyone can now suggest new features, improvements, or bug reports from the navigation panel (“Suggest a feature”), the Help panel, or any symptom page — and track their status and read responses from the Signposting team on a new My suggestions page. Symptom-content suggestions continue to be reviewed by practice admins; app-level feedback is triaged centrally in System management. See Feedback & Suggestions.
• Rich-text editor rebuilt: everywhere you edit instructions or handbook content, the editor now has a cleaner, more capable toolbar — section headings, links (web and e-mail), underline, and background highlights in soft NHS tints, alongside the existing bold, italic, lists and text colours. Content pasted from Word or Google Docs is automatically cleaned up, the editor no longer flashes a loading placeholder, and a bug that could corrupt content starting with a list or heading has been fixed.
• Symptom previews (in the Symptom Library drawer and Clinical Review) now show the symptom’s age-group variants, so reviewers see everything staff will see.
• Practice-level control over age-group variants: when a symptom carries shared age-group variants, practice admins can now choose per symptom whether to use the shared variants, customise them with practice-specific wording, or hide them entirely — so customised instructions are no longer shown next to uncustomised shared variant text. Changes only affect your practice.
• Stronger clinical governance: any manual edit a practice makes to a symptom’s content — instructions, notices or age-group variants — now returns that symptom to Pending in Clinical Review, so edited advice is always re-approved before it counts as clinically reviewed. (Previously only AI-made changes and newly created symptoms required review.)
• Clinical Review previews: the “Base wording” toggle now applies to age-group variants as well as the main instructions, so reviewers comparing against the shared library see the shared variants too.
• Age-group variants can now be added when creating any symptom from the Add Symptom dialog — shared-library symptoms and practice-created symptoms alike — and edited later from the symptom page. Practice-created symptoms carry their own variants, visible only to that practice.

Fixed

• AI suggestions no longer lose inline images: when instructions containing an image are rewritten by AI (“Suggest improved wording” or surgery customisation), the image is now preserved in place — and if the AI moved on without it, it is re-attached at the end of the instructions rather than lost.
• Highlight rules no longer corrupt formatting: a highlight phrase that matched text inside a link or image attribute (for example alt text) could break the surrounding formatting. Highlighting now only applies to visible text.
• Brief instructions and important notices now always display exactly as typed: both fields are entered as plain text, but anything tag-shaped in them (for example <b>, or a snippet pasted in from a web page) was being interpreted as formatting instead of shown. They now render character for character, on symptom cards, symptom pages and the admin symptom list alike. Highlight rules still colour matching phrases in both fields, including phrases containing & such as “A&E”.
• Feedback & suggestions triage (System management): symptom-content suggestions — which are reviewed by each practice’s own admins — are now hidden from the central triage list and its counts by default; select the Symptom content type filter to view them. The table also now scrolls horizontally instead of cutting off the Status and Submitted columns on narrower screens.
• Fixed the “Review and respond” link in new-suggestion notification emails pointing at an inaccessible internal deployment address instead of the app.
• Fixed the Sales Pipeline “Add Practice” dialog rejecting new entries with an “Invalid input” error when no contract variant was selected — the variant is now genuinely optional before the proposal stage, matching the form.
• Age-group variants no longer disappear from the editor once a practice has customised a symptom — variants are shared content on the base symptom, and system administrators can now view and edit them from any practice’s view of the symptom, with changes saved to the shared base copy.
• Fixed the system admin Edit Symptom form silently clearing a symptom’s variants on save: existing variants now load into the form (shown expanded rather than hidden behind “Add Variants”), the variant position (before/after the main instructions) is preserved, and variant instructions now use the rich-text editor rather than a raw HTML box.
• Fixed variant edits made in the symptom page’s “Edit Instructions” mode being silently discarded, and cancelled edits leaking half-finished variant changes into later saves.
• The “You’re viewing” surgery selector in the header now always matches the surgery in the page address. Previously, opening a surgery page from a link or bookmark (for example the Checklist links on the system Setup Tracker) could leave the header — and the navigation panel — showing the last surgery you had selected, even though the page content was for the surgery you opened.

v1.6 (June–July 2026)

New

• All-ages mode: surgeries that don’t use age-group variants can now hide the Under 5 / Over 5 / Adult age bands entirely, showing a single instruction per symptom (feature-flagged — contact us to enable).
• Clinical Review: new “Hide disabled” filter so disabled symptoms no longer clutter the review queue, with symptom counts that now reconcile correctly against what’s shown.
• Clinical Review: the pending-review notice is now visible to all roles (not just admins), with a clearer message that adapts to how many symptoms are awaiting review.

Updated

• Symptom Library redesign: a simpler, faster symptom grid, with symptom previews now opening in a slide-out drawer instead of a pop-up window — easier to browse and compare.
• Signposting settings: surgery selection now works from a single source of truth, fixing inconsistencies between the settings page and the symptom library.
• AI customisation: when adapting instructions to your surgery, the AI now also rewrites the Important Notice using your local terminology — and if you’ve deliberately cleared a notice, it will never be brought back by a later AI run.
• Consistent confirmation dialogs and success/error notifications across the admin areas.
• Engagement analytics redesign (Signposting settings → Engagement): a new daily views-over-time chart, summary tiles with change vs the previous period, least-viewed symptoms and busiest days & times insights, proportional bars on the ranked lists, and a cleaner look consistent with the rest of the admin area.
• Users page revamp: at-a-glance member stats (total, practice admins, 30-day active, never signed in), sortable name/last-active columns, filters for role, Handbook access and inactivity, and a consolidated member panel (details, permissions, default surgery, password reset, remove access) replacing the separate pop-up dialogs. The Practice Handbook permissions column now only appears for surgeries with the Handbook enabled.

Fixed

• Fixed “Add symptom” failing with an “Invalid input” error for some practices when creating a surgery-specific symptom — the server rejected practices with older-style surgery identifiers. Error messages from the add-symptom dialog now also say which field was rejected, rather than just “Invalid input”.
• Fixed accepting an AI wording suggestion on a practice-customised symptom appearing to do nothing — the accepted wording was saved to the wrong place (the shared library copy) instead of the practice’s own version, so the page never showed the change. Accepted suggestions now update the practice’s customised version, and symptom lists refresh straight away instead of showing stale text for a few minutes.
• Bulk approve in Clinical Review now respects the “Hide disabled” filter — you can no longer accidentally approve symptoms you’ve hidden.
• Fixed highlight colours occasionally “leaking” between symptoms after AI customisation, and search results matching against out-of-date base content.
• Engagement analytics: Export Data now downloads the real figures as CSV (it previously produced placeholder sample data), the Total Symptom Views tile now counts every view in the period rather than only the top-listed symptoms, and the engagement data endpoint now requires sign-in and is scoped to your own surgery.

For system administrators

• Surgeries can now be classified as LIVE or TEST, keeping demo and training data out of live reporting.
• AI customisation can be smartly re-run across a surgery, automatically skipping any symptoms that have been locally edited.
• Setup tracker activity and AI customisation counts now report accurately.
• Setup Tracker stages now reflect real usage: a surgery counts as Live once its essential setup is complete and it has been used in the last 30 days. Recommended steps are advisory and no longer hold surgeries at “Nearly there” — which also stops false “go-live date passed” critical flags on actively used surgeries.
• Fixed surgery provisioning so that enabling the Practice Handbook during provisioning now seeds the starter template pages automatically — previously the handbook started empty unless the feature was toggled again afterwards.
• Global Users page revamp: at-a-glance stats (total users, system admins, 30-day active, never signed in), sortable name/last-active columns, filters for role, test users, missing surgeries and inactivity, search that matches surgery names, and a consolidated per-user detail panel (details, memberships, password reset, deletion) replacing the separate pop-up dialogs. Also fixes the table header disappearing while scrolling.
• Sales Pipeline: free-trial visibility: practices on a free trial now show a “Free Trial” badge in the tracker, plus a new “Trial Ends” column with a colour-coded countdown (amber within 30 days, red within 7 days or once ended). When a trial has ended — or ends within a week — without an invoice being generated, the row is highlighted and flagged “Invoice due”, and an alert above the table lists every practice needing an invoice, alongside a warning of trials ending in the next 60 days. Also adds an “On Free Trial” summary tile, trial days remaining in the Excel export, and fixes misaligned column widths in exported spreadsheets.
• Sales Pipeline: archive and easier navigation: practices that go quiet after a demo or proposal can now be archived — they keep their last status and can be restored any time via the “Show archived” toggle, but no longer clutter the tracker, stats or trial alerts. The tracker also gains a search box (practice, PCN, town or contact), status filter chips, and sortable columns (name, list size, fee, status, contract start, trial end, days in pipeline). Contact names now link straight to email with the contact’s role shown beneath, and provisioned practices link through to their surgery dashboard. Exports reflect the current filtered view and include an Archived column.
• Sales Pipeline: NHS practice lookup: when adding a practice, start typing the name and pick the real practice from the NHS national register — the address, town, PCN and patient list size fill in automatically (with the estimated fee calculated from the list size). Practice names, addresses and PCNs come live from the NHS ODS directory; list sizes come from NHS Digital’s monthly publication, cached in a new Practice Data tab that refreshes automatically each month with a manual refresh and CSV upload fallback. Matched entries record their ODS code, and a warning flags when list-size data is missing or stale.

v1.5 (April–May 2026)

New

• Practice admins can now customise symptom display names for their surgery — useful for local terminology — without affecting the underlying clinical content.

Updated

• Symptom customisation: clearing a field in a symptom override is now remembered as deliberately blank, rather than falling back to the base content unexpectedly.
• Engagement analytics: views generated by clinical review activity are now excluded from usage counts, so your analytics reflect genuine front-desk use.

Fixed

• Fixed the Practice Handbook link in the in-app help dialog.
• Fixed a clinical review issue where a background data update could silently mark symptoms as approved without review.

For system administrators

• New Surgery Setup Tracker dashboard showing every surgery’s setup completion and health at a glance.
• Setup Guide document generation and invoice tracking added to the pipeline tools.
• Surgery provisioning can now reuse existing user accounts, and a contract variant is required at the proposal stage.

v1.4 (February–March 2026)

New

• Enhanced Setup Checklist: setup steps are now grouped into essential and recommended items with a progress bar, so new surgeries can see exactly what’s left to go live.
• Surgery Health dashboard: once the essential setup steps are complete, admins see governance, usage, and content health cards summarising how the surgery is doing.
• Admin pages opened from the Setup Checklist now show a “Back to Setup Checklist” link so you don’t lose your place.

Updated

• Clinical Review: the review tab now sorts symptoms intelligently (items needing attention first) and includes a direct help link.
• AI customisation: clinician archetypes now support restrictions and correct handling of under-5s instructions.
• AI setup: configuration problems now produce clear, actionable error messages instead of a generic “AI service is not configured”.
• Improved the visual design of the navigation (hamburger) menu.

Fixed

• Fixed broken links from the Setup Checklist to the Appointment Directory and Highlight Rules pages.

For system administrators

• New sales pipeline management system covering prospect tracking, communications templates, and surgery provisioning.

Foundation Releases (Historical)

v1.3 (January 2026)

New

• Practice Handbook: added Engagement tab showing most viewed items and most active users, filterable by time period (7d / 30d / 90d / all time) — helps admins understand what content is being used.
• Practice Handbook: added Audit tab showing a chronological feed of recent changes (who changed what, when), filterable by time period and change type — supports governance and troubleshooting.
• Practice Handbook (formerly Admin Toolkit): operational info panel at the bottom of the staff front page is now collapsible (defaults to collapsed). The panel automatically expands when the on-take GP changes, and remembers your preference.
• Practice Handbook: added category visibility controls and per-item editing permissions, so you can safely share sensitive guidance with the right people and let standard users edit specific items without access to the admin dashboard.
• Practice Handbook: PAGE items now support optional Intro text above Role Cards and Additional notes below.
• Practice Handbook: added LIST items (simple editable tables) for storing structured information.

Updated

• Navigation: Help & Documentation now opens an in-app Help panel with quick links and simple search, designed for task-focused, in-the-moment support. The full documentation site remains available via a clear external link (opens in a new tab).
• Practice Handbook: updated Quick Access settings to make it simpler to choose up to 6 buttons for the staff home screen.
• Practice Handbook: admin page reorganised into Items / Structure & Settings tabs for clarity.
• Practice Handbook: settings cog moved to page header (consistent with main signposting tool) and opens the shared preferences dialog; blue cards mode now only affects individual item cards, not the surrounding container.
• Practice Handbook: improved the Items picker with search, type filters, and grouped (collapsible) sections by category.
• Practice Handbook: the editor now opens ready to create a new item by default (no previous item auto-selected).
• Practice Handbook: “Structure & Settings” is now laid out as a cleaner settings dashboard with section navigation.
• Practice Handbook: categories are searchable with clearer hierarchy and controls; pinned panel includes a preview; rota “upcoming weeks” is now collapsible.
• Practice Handbook: restored sticky categories sidebar and pinned bottom panel on the front page (with natural page scrolling).
• Practice Handbook: improved Quick access buttons with a scalable searchable picker and optional labels (defaults to the target item title).
• Practice Handbook: Quick access buttons now auto-save changes to avoid an extra “Save” step.
• Practice Handbook: Role cards now respect blue-cards mode and the editor auto-expands when populated.
• Workflow Guidance: workflow diagram viewer restores connector lines, arrowheads, and labels for saved and newly created edges.
• Workflow Guidance: workflow diagram details panel can be collapsed to give more space for the diagram.
• Landing page now frames AI as optional tools, adds onboarding and support copy, and links to the FAQs for common governance questions.
• AI questions panel now titled “Suggested wording for questions to ask” with supporting text to encourage safe, consistent phrasing.
• Clicking the Signposting Toolkit logo now keeps you within your current surgery, using /s as a safer signed-in entry route.
• Symptom page links now use the same surgery identifier as the main /s/[id] routes, with older links automatically redirected.
• Surgery admins can now apply AI wording suggestions within their own surgery (superusers remain supported).
• Admin forms no longer ask for symptom slugs — slugs are generated automatically, and high-risk buttons now link to symptoms via a searchable list.
• Symptom search and clinical review counts now refresh immediately after creating, approving, enabling, or deleting symptoms.
• Highlight rules in the Admin Dashboard can now be edited (instead of delete-and-recreate), with clearer guidance when a phrase already exists.
• Marketing and app domains separated: www.signpostingtool.co.uk shows the public site while app.signpostingtool.co.uk routes straight into the toolkit entry screen.

Fixed

• Practice Handbook: fixed Role cards auto-expand when opening via “Edit”, and fixed Quick access button reordering persistence.

v1.2 — Workflow Guidance Module (January 2026)

• Workflow Guidance Module — Visual workflow guidance engine with global default workflows, per-surgery customisation, draft/approved governance lifecycle, and feature-flag controlled rollout
• Added a public FAQs page covering setup, governance, and optional AI tools (linked from the marketing navigation)
• Redesigned marketing landing page with clearer hero, benefits strip, and 3-step “How it works” section
• Added trust section highlighting GP-built origins and local clinical control
• User Guide link restored in marketing site navigation alongside Docs link

v1.1 (December 2025)

• AI Suggested Questions panel added
• New symptom detail page layout
• Appointment Directory promoted to top navigation
• Preferences system added: Modern vs Classic cards, Quick-scan mode, Header layouts, High-risk button selection
• Highlight engine improved (orange/red/pink/purple/green)
• Symptom library list UI: improved table, new badges, cleaner actions
• Admin dashboard reorganised
• Improved age filters and high-risk filters
• Revised user roles display
• Added clear links from the main app to the documentation site
• Removed old AI Training Mode / quiz module

v1.0 — Web Release (October–November 2025)

• First full web version
• Clinical Review workflow
• Multi-surgery tenancy
• Engagement tracking
• Feature flags
• AI Instruction Editor
• Improved admin dashboard
• User management redesign

Pre-2025 — Beta and Prototypes

PowerApps Version

Internal prototype used at Ide Lane Surgery.