We are pleased to announce the upcoming release of NHS at Work 7.5, introducing faster leave approval workflows, enhanced unavailability management, and improved contract compliance guidance. This release focuses on reducing the time taken to process leave requests, giving leave approvers greater flexibility when managing unavailability, and supporting organisations with clearer contract-aligned decision making.
This release includes:
- Deep Links for Leave Request Approvals
- Enhanced Unavailability Editing
- Enhanced Hours Warning for Leave Requests
- Coming Soon & Bug Reduction
Deep Links for Leave Request Approvals
This release introduces direct links from leave request email notifications, allowing approvers to open the relevant request immediately without navigating through NHS at Work.
Key functionality
- Direct access from email
- Leave approval emails now include a secure deep link to the specific leave request.
- Improved desktop experience
- When an approver opens the link from a desktop:
- Users are prompted to log in if required.
- Once authenticated, the requested leave record opens automatically.
- Approvers can review request details and approve or decline in one click.
- When an approver opens the link from a desktop:
- Mobile experience
- When logging in from a mobile device, the application will recognise if the NHS at Work app has been installed and:
- If the app is installed, open directly to the leave request.
- Where the app is not installed, users are guided to download it from the appropriate app store.
- When logging in from a mobile device, the application will recognise if the NHS at Work app has been installed and:
Benefits
- Faster leave approval process.
- Reduces clicks to review and approve/decline unavailability from seven to one, per request.
- Seamless experience for desktop and mobile.
- Improved user experience for consultants, rota coordinators and administrators.
Enhanced Unavailability Editing
Users with the Edit Others Unavailability permission can now edit sickness records for other staff members, bringing sickness records into line with existing unavailability editing functionality.
Key functionality
- Expanded editing permissions
- Users with Edit Others Unavailability permission can now edit:
- Sickness records
- Other existing unavailability types
- Users with Edit Others Unavailability permission can now edit:
- This functionality applies only to other users' records and cannot be used to edit personal unavailability.
- Editable information
- The following fields remain read-only:
- Staff member
- Primary leave reason
- Secondary leave reason
- The following fields remain read-only:
- Users can continue to amend:
- Start and end dates/times
- Time period
- Leave approver
- Leave reason (where applicable)
- Enhanced privacy
- Visibility of secondary sickness reasons has been improved.
- Users with Edit Others Unavailability can no longer view secondary sickness reasons.
- Users with Super Leave Approver permission retain visibility of both primary and secondary reasons.
- Visibility of secondary sickness reasons has been improved.
Benefits
- Reduced administrative overhead when correcting sickness records.
- Improved security and confidentiality.
Enhanced Hours Warning for Leave Requests
The enhanced hours warning has been amended to improve the leave approval experience for all authorised users. While the warning itself is not new, it can now be viewed and actioned consistently by any user with permission to review and approve unavailability requests. This resolves an issue where consultants could encounter errors when reviewing leave requests submitted during enhanced hours.
Key functionality
- Improved approval experience
- The existing enhanced hours warning is now available to all authorised leave approvers throughout the approval workflow. When reviewing an annual leave request that overlaps enhanced hours:
- Users with permission to approve or reject unavailability will see the existing warning message. Note: organisations with two-stage leave approval switched on will see this message during the final stage of approval.
- Approvers can continue to review and action the request without encountering application errors.
- The existing enhanced hours warning is now available to all authorised leave approvers throughout the approval workflow. When reviewing an annual leave request that overlaps enhanced hours:
- The warning continues to:
- Display when annual leave overlaps fully or partially with enhanced hours.
- Update automatically if the leave type or requested dates change.
- Not display for sickness requests.
Benefits
- Resolves issues experienced by consultants when approving leave during enhanced hours.
- Delivers a consistent warning experience for all authorised leave approvers.
- Supports contract-aligned decision-making during leave approval.
Coming Soon…
Improved Leave Management
We're continuing to enhance the leave management experience in NHS at Work with several usability and compliance improvements, including:
- Responsive Leave Tables – Improved responsiveness for My Leave, Manage Leave and All Leave to display correctly on smaller laptop screens, ensuring key actions such as Add Unavailability remain accessible and table navigation is easier through improved scrolling behaviour.
- Saved Filter Preferences – Users will be able to save their preferred Manage Leave filters, with selections automatically reapplied when you log back in to reduce repetitive filtering and improve productivity.
- Enhanced Non-Resident On-Call (NROC) Calculations – Improved calculation of working time for Non-Resident On-Call duties, providing more accurate working time warnings and validation across both rotas and rosters, in line with Resident Doctor contractual requirements.
Published: 08/07/2026