NHS Copilot Starter Kit

Twelve copy-and-paste prompts for the AI assistant already sitting in your NHSmail account — and the rules that keep you on the right side of the acceptable-use policy.

Free toolkitLast reviewed: 9 July 2026

General information for GP partners, not legal advice. This guide is independent — not endorsed by, or affiliated with, NHS England or Microsoft.

What you already have

Most partners do not know they already have a serious AI assistant included with NHSmail at no cost. Every NHSmail account includes Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat free of charge: a GPT-5-class, web-grounded AI chat with enterprise data protection switched on across the NHSmail tenant. It includes file upload, Copilot Pages and image generation. There is nothing to buy, no licence to request, and nothing for your IT support to install.

£0

Cost to your practice

Included with every NHSmail account

UK NHS tenant

Where prompts are stored

180-day retention, auditable

505,000

Staff getting full Copilot

announced June 2026, expected by October 2026

One boundary worth understanding from the start: Copilot Chat does not see your emails, calendar or files unless you paste text or upload a file into the chat. It only works with what you put in front of it. That limits what it can do — and it also means you decide, message by message, exactly what it gets to read.

The landscape is about to shift. NHS England announced on 8 June 2026 that the full Microsoft 365 Copilot — the version embedded in Word, Excel and Outlook — will be rolled out to 505,000 NHS staff, expected by October 2026. The timing for GP practices has not been confirmed. Which makes the free Copilot Chat the tool to learn on now: the prompting habits you build in the chat carry straight over when the embedded version arrives.

The rules first

Before the prompts, the policy. NHSmail's Acceptable Use Policy (v1.3, February 2026) draws one line, and it is a clear one.

The acceptable-use line, verbatim

Copilot “can be used for all administrative and business support purposes, including those involving sensitive information, such as Clinical Administration activities with sensitive information” but “must not be used to make clinical decisions or in relation to any activity requiring clinical judgement”.

The policy also sets three standing obligations:

Check before use — outputs must be checked by the member of staff before use.
Label AI content — AI-generated content should be labelled as such.
Local policy first— your own organisation's local policy takes precedence.

On data handling: prompts and responses are stored at rest within the UK NHS tenant, with a 180-day retention period, and are auditable. Processing is routed to the UK and EU first — but NHS England's own assessment accepts that some processing, for example web-search queries, may take place outside the UK and EU. The honest one-liner: UK-stored, mostly UK-processed, not UK-guaranteed.

The practical reading for a partner: Copilot Chat is fine for admin and business work — minutes, rotas, adverts, letters, business cases — and never for anything requiring clinical judgement. If in doubt, treat it as a brilliant administrator, not a clinician. The full detail is in the NHSmail introduction to Copilot Chat and the acceptable-use policy itself.

Getting set up

Three steps, two minutes:

Open m365.cloud.microsoft/chat — or find Copilot in the app launcher in NHSmail webmail.
Sign in with your nhs.net account. Signing in is what puts you inside the NHS tenant, with enterprise data protection switched on.
Pin the tab. It earns a permanent place next to your clinical system.

Prefer talking to typing? The microphone in the Copilot Chat prompt box, and Dictate in Word and Outlook, are free to use now — dictate the brief rather than typing it. Real-time voice conversation with Copilot needs a paid licence, so ignore anything that asks you to upgrade for it.

Open Copilot Chat

Three habits that change the results

The gap between a useless answer and a genuinely time-saving one is rarely the tool. It is these three habits:

Give it a role and context before the task. An assistant that knows it is working for the managing partner of an English GP practice writes very differently from one guessing at a generic office. That is exactly what prompts 1 and 2 below do — start every session with one of them.
Paste, don't refer.The free chat cannot see your inbox, calendar or documents unless you put them in front of it. “Summarise the ICB letter” gets you nothing; pasting the letter gets you a summary.
Verify before you use, and label AI-assisted work. These are not style preferences — they are the acceptable-use obligations from the section above. Nothing Copilot writes should leave the practice unchecked.

The twelve prompts

Copy a prompt, open Copilot Chat, paste it in, and replace anything in [square brackets] with your own detail.

Getting started

Make Copilot ask first

Use it for: any task where you would normally have to write a long brief

Before you do anything else, ask me up to five short questions that would help you do this task well. Wait for my answers, then complete the task. The task: [describe what you need, for example: draft a letter to patients about our new appointment system]

Set the scene for the whole chat

Use it for: the first message of any working session

You are helping the managing partner of an NHS GP practice in England with practice administration. Our practice has [number] patients, [number] GPs and [number] other staff. Use UK terminology and keep NHS England policy and UK employment law in mind. When you are not certain something is current, say so and tell me what I should verify. My first task: [task]

Meetings

Minutes from rough notes

Use it for: turning scribbles into minutes in one pass

I will paste rough notes from our partners' meeting. Turn them into formal minutes with: attendees and apologies; numbered items, each with a short summary of the discussion; decisions clearly marked; and an action table at the end with columns for action, owner and deadline. Use initials rather than full names. Stick strictly to what is in my notes and do not add anything. The notes: [paste your notes]

An agenda that runs to time

Use it for: the monthly partners' meeting

Draft an agenda for our monthly partners' meeting, which lasts 90 minutes. Standing items: finance update, staffing, complaints and significant events, contract and QOF progress, premises, any other business. This month we also need to decide on [topic]. Put the decision items early, give every item a realistic time allocation, and note what preparation each item needs and from whom.

Staff and HR

A job advert worth applying to

Use it for: vacancies you need filled quickly

Draft a job advert for a [role] at our GP practice in [town]: [hours] hours a week, salary [range]. Structure it as: a warm two-line opening; a short paragraph about the practice that I can edit; key responsibilities as bullet points; a person specification split into essential and desirable; and how to apply by [closing date]. Professional but human in tone. Do not invent facts about the practice. Leave square brackets wherever you need information from me.

A policy first draft

Use it for: getting a policy from blank page to reviewable

Draft a [policy name] policy for a GP practice in England, with sections for purpose, scope, responsibilities, procedure and review date. Wherever the right wording depends on current employment law or NHS guidance, do not guess. Insert a clearly marked note telling me what to verify and where. This is a first draft for internal review, not a finished policy.

Patient communications

Plain-English rewrite

Use it for: announcements, posters and website updates

Rewrite this practice announcement for patients: reading age of about 11, friendly but clear, under 150 words, no jargon. Keep every fact exactly as I wrote it and change only the language. Then give me a second version as a text message of under 320 characters. The announcement: [paste]

A complaint acknowledgement with the right tone

Use it for: the first response, before the clinical account is ready

I will paste an anonymised summary of a patient complaint. Draft a first-response letter that acknowledges the complaint, shows empathy without admitting fault, sets out our understanding of the concerns, and explains how we will look into it and when they will hear from us. Wherever a clinical explanation belongs, insert the placeholder [CLINICAL RESPONSE - responsible GP to complete] rather than writing it yourself. The summary, with names and identifiers removed: [paste]

Documents and data

Digest a long document

Use it for: contract updates, ICB papers, anything over ten pages

Here is a long document. Summarise it for a GP partner: first, five bullet points on what it says; then the three things most likely to affect a practice's workload or income, each with a pointer to the part of the document it comes from; finally, any dates or deadlines it contains. The document: [paste the text, or upload the file]

The Excel formula, explained

Use it for: rotas, finance sheets and search results you manage in Excel

I manage our practice rota in Excel. I want a formula that [describe what you want, for example: counts how many sessions each GP is rostered for in a month from a grid of initials]. Give me the formula, tell me exactly which cell to put it in, and explain how it works in plain English so I can adjust it myself later.

Planning and compliance

An outline business case

Use it for: anything you need the partnership to agree to

Build an outline business case for [proposal, for example: recruiting a clinical pharmacist through the ARRS scheme]. Sections: the current problem; the options, including doing nothing; the costs, written as a list of questions for me to answer; the expected benefits; the risks and how we would reduce them; and a recommendation section left blank for the partners. Ask me your cost questions first, then produce the outline.

A CQC preparation checklist

Use it for: getting ahead of an assessment

Create a preparation checklist for a CQC assessment of a GP practice under the well-led key question. Organise it by CQC's quality statements and, for each one, suggest the kind of evidence a practice could show. CQC's approach changes over time, so start the checklist with a note reminding me to check the current framework on cqc.org.uk before relying on it.

Open Copilot Chat

What's next

This starter set covers the admin foundations — meetings, staff, patient communications, documents, planning. Once these twelve feel routine, you will start spotting your own uses, and that is the point: the kit is a way in, not a ceiling.

A fuller prompt library for partners — contract work, finance, QOF planning, HR deep-dives — is in the works. New prompts are shared first through The Partner Brief, the free email briefing; the signup is at the bottom of this page.

The safe way to think about it

Copilot Chat is a capable administrator who never gets tired, never minds redrafting, and must never make clinical judgements. Keep it on the business side of the practice, check everything before it leaves the building, and it will quietly hand you hours back every week.

Sources and further reading

Last reviewed: 9 July 2026. All links checked at that date.

This guide is independent — not endorsed by, or affiliated with, NHS England or Microsoft. General information for GP partners, not legal advice.