Multicast Notification Service (MNS)

The Multicast Notification Service (MNS) allows NHS England event producers to publish patient-related events using ‘publish-subscribe’ messages. Publish-subscribe messages allow multiple interested parties (subscribers) to be notified of an event (from a publisher). MNS is a lightweight service meaning the published event doesn't contain the information about the event, but it does contain a data reference to where the data can be retrieved.

This not only reduces data transfer costs, it also means that all parties are working off the same source of information.

Communicating changes to subscribers using a targeted notification format has numerous benefits over larger scale reporting methods.

MNS is for systems that need to share information with more than one other system - these are event publishers. Event publishers are usually national services, such as the Personal Demographics Service.

MNS is also for systems that want to receive updates about events they have subscribed to. Event subscribers can be national services, supplier systems, or specific use cases. To see what events you can subscribe to check what information is available.

Event publishers

This service is recommended for all national services that need to publish notifications to multiple interested parties.

Event subscribers

This service is recommended for all health and care systems that would benefit from receiving the supported event types.

To access this service you will need to onboard as either a publisher or a subscriber (or both) depending on your use case. As a subscriber you will also need to onboard to the data source (normally an API) of the event you want to subscribe to.

Learn how to integrate with MNS using the resources below, and chat to us in the Developer Community if you have any questions.

A generic example of MNS in use:

1. An NHS system detects that data has changed and stores the updated data in a central system (for example, PDM).
2. The system publishes an MNS event describing the change, along with filter criteria.
3. Subscriber systems receive the event if their subscription matches the filter criteria.
4. The subscriber systems use the information in the event to retrieve the updated data from the source system.

Some examples of MNS in use:

• The Personal Demographics Service notifying interested parties that a patient's NHS number has changed. GP systems can subscribe to all patient NHS numbers within their GP systems and use this notification to update their local copy of the patient's details so they have up to date information for contacting the patient.

• The Health Checks team notifying a GP that a health check for their patient is available. This flow also has an acknowledgement flow to let the Health Checks team know that the health check has been received by the GP.

This service is live and has been in active use since 2024.

MNS is currently publishing approximately 1,200,000 events per month.

MNS is a bronze service, meaning it is available and supported between 8am and 6pm, Monday to Friday excluding Bank Holidays.

The following services are related to MNS: