Best apps for FY1 doctors: what to install, and in what order

Install three things now: the BNF, iResus and MDCalc. None of them needs an NHS email, and all three work the day you download them. Almost everything else worth having waits on something you do not have yet — a trust email address, a licence your employer bought, or a login IT sets up in induction week — which is why so many FY1s arrive on the ward in August with half a phone.

This page is the full list, in the order to set it up, with the downsides included. Most pages answering this question are a year or more out of date — several still recommend an app that was switched off in 2024 — and nearly all of them stop at the app's name, which is the easy half. The useful half is what each one will not do, and what to use instead when it lets you down. One declared interest up front: bleep.guide is itself an app for new doctors, and where ours appears below it is marked as ours, with the same scepticism applied. If you take one thing from this page, take the BNF, not us.

Anything you need in an emergency has to work with no signal

Anything you might need in an emergency has to work with no signal.

There is no signal in the basement, in the lift, in the CT waiting bay, or on a surprising number of wards — the same buildings that block X-rays block phone masts, and the corridor where the crash bleep goes off is reliably the corridor with one bar. An app that needs a connection to open an algorithm is not an emergency app; it is a bookmark.

So the test for anything on your first home screen is simple: put the phone in flight mode and open it. The BNF passes, because it downloads its whole formulary to the device.¹ iResus passes, because the algorithms are held on the phone.² Most of the rest — the bleep directories, the guideline platforms, the poisons database in its web form — need signal, which is fine, because you do not need them in the first five minutes of an emergency. Sort your phone by that rule and the rest of this page is detail.

The shortlist, at a glance

Each line: what it is for, what it costs, what you need to get in, and whether it survives a ward with no signal.

• BNF + BNFC — the drug reference you open every shift. Free, for people working or training in the NHS; downloads to the phone and works offline.¹
• iResus (Resuscitation Council UK) — the resuscitation algorithms, held on the device.²
• MDCalc — the scores people ask you for on the phone. Free with a free account, works offline, built in the US.⁴
• Accurx (was Induction, then Accurx Switch) — crowd-sourced bleep and ward numbers. Free, needs an NHS email to register, needs signal.⁶
• Eolas Medical — your trust's own guidelines, antimicrobials included. Free to you, gated per hospital, and since late 2024 it is also where the old MicroGuide content lives.⁹
• TOXBASE — the national poisons database. Free with an NHS, MOD, UKHSA or ac.uk address, renewed annually; the app searches offline.^{13 15}
• BMJ Best Practice and NICE CKS — reading up properly, usually after the shift. Free to NHS staff via OpenAthens, online only.¹⁶
• Health Toolbox (was Dr Toolbox) — how things get done at your specific hospital. Free, and only as good as what your site has maintained.¹⁸
• Blood Assist and Blood Components — official NHS Blood and Transplant references, for the first time you are asked to prescribe blood. Free, no login.^{19 20}
• Horus or Turas — the e-portfolio. Not really an app, but it belongs on this list because ARCP is where the gaps show.²¹
• Our app — bleep.guide; see the section near the end, where we say what it is not.

Set them up in this order

Now, before any of your logins exist

The BNF, iResus and MDCalc. Open the BNF once on wifi and let it pull its content down, because the questions arrive in the bay with one bar of signal, not at the desk in the doctors' office. It is updated monthly and the app is published by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, so it is the same text as the print copy on the ward — just faster and never missing from the trolley.¹

One naming trap: the app is currently listed as BNF + BNFC in both stores. Older pages tell you to search "NICE BNF", which was the previous listing and now leads nowhere.¹

Put iResus on the first home screen while you are calm — the moment you need it is the moment you will not be searching for it. And one caveat that matters: the Resuscitation Council published Guidelines 2025 in October 2025, and iResus still carries the 2021 algorithms, with the updated version described as coming soon.^{3 2} The 2021 content remains what most wards trained on, but check anything time-critical against the current guideline rather than assuming the app has caught up.

The day IT gives you your NHS email

Three registrations, all gated on an eligible address, all better done in induction week than at 3am.

TOXBASE first. Registration needs an NHS, MOD, UKHSA or ac.uk address, and the account is yours alone: the shared departmental logins people used to pass around were retired at the end of May 2026, so the old habit of borrowing the ED's password no longer works.¹⁴ The account needs revalidating every year when the email arrives.¹³ Get the app as well as the web login — it searches the database offline, which the website cannot.¹⁵

Accurx second — the bleep-number app, covered properly below, which will not let you register without the trust address.⁶

Then an NHS OpenAthens account, which is the key to a great deal else: BMJ Best Practice, the NHS Knowledge and Library Hub, and most of what your library service pays for.¹⁶ In Scotland, BMJ resources are funded for all NHS staff by NHS Education for Scotland.¹⁷ The route in differs between the four nations, so it is worth testing the login once while someone from the library service is still in the room at induction.

On induction day, before you install the wrong one

Ask how your trust publishes its guidelines. For years the stock answer was MicroGuide, and you will still find pages — including some updated this year — telling you to install it. That app was switched off in September 2024, when the platform was bought by Eolas Medical and every trust's content was migrated across.^{10 9} A 2023 analysis counted 115 UK trusts hosting their antimicrobial guidelines on MicroGuide, which is roughly how many are now reached through Eolas instead.¹¹

So in practice: install Eolas Medical, create an account, and search for your hospital's space. Some trusts admit anyone with a validated trust email immediately; others require an approval that can take hours, which is another induction-week job rather than a night-shift one.¹² The content works offline once synced, as MicroGuide's did.⁹ And whatever your trust uses — Eolas, something else, or an intranet page from 2011 — the local antimicrobial policy on it beats anything you read anywhere else, including here.

Ask whether Health Toolbox has a live entry for your site. It is a per-hospital wiki of how things actually get done — referral routes, who to bleep, which form the CT request wants — and where the local editors have kept it up it is genuinely useful. The honest caveat is that maintenance varies enormously between sites, and the app itself has not been updated since mid-2022, so treat it as a directory that might be excellent and might be abandoned.¹⁸ The outgoing FY1 at shadowing will tell you which in ten seconds.

Then arrange the phone by the job

Apps are not used alphabetically. They are used because a bleep went off, so the honest way to organise the list is by the call.

You need a bleep number

Accurx — the app formerly known as Induction, which is the name half the ward still uses. The history matters only because it breaks search: Induction was acquired by Accurx in June 2023, became Accurx Switch, and has been plain Accurx since June 2025 — so search the current name or you will find nothing.^{7 8} It is free, needs the NHS email, and its numbers are crowd-sourced, which is both its strength and its weakness: wards move, rotas change, and the number that worked in March connects to a storeroom in August. It also needs signal. Switchboard remains the backstop, and learning the switchboard shortcut on the ward phones beats any app.

Our own hospital directory does the same job for the sites we have covered so far, which is not yet all of them — where your hospital is in it, it works signed-in from any browser; where it is not, Accurx and switchboard are the answer.

You have been asked to prescribe something you have never prescribed

The BNF for the drug; the trust's guideline app for the local choice — antimicrobial policy in particular is decided hospital by hospital, and the app on your phone should be the one your microbiologists write. Then the ward pharmacist, who will find the problem on the drug chart before anyone else does and is the most underused resource available to a new FY1.

For the prescriptions that arrive as bleeps — write up some fluids, something for pain — our ward-cover pages walk the decision rather than just the dose, and they are written for the version of you answering at 3am rather than the version revising in July.

The arrest bleep goes off

iResus, on the home screen, not in a folder called Medical. Learn the crash call number before you need it — 2222 in most UK hospitals, but confirm it at induction rather than assuming. Our emergency checklists are built for the minutes before the team arrives — worked down as a list at the bedside, not navigated as a flowchart — and they end at escalation, because that is where an FY1's job in an emergency ends. They are orientation, not a protocol, and no substitute for the algorithm or for the registrar.

And for the job an FY1 actually gets handed at an arrest — the scribe sheet — our app has an ALS Scribe mode: a continuous clock with the cycle intervals running and one-tap logging for each event, so the record keeps itself while you watch the patient rather than your watch. It logs; the decisions stay with the team leader, which is the correct division of labour in every sense.

One design opinion, held with reasonable confidence after watching people use these things: flowchart apps are less useful in a real emergency than they look from the sofa. A decision tree wants your full attention to answer its questions; a checklist lets you glance, do, and glance again while someone else is doing compressions.

Someone has taken an overdose

TOXBASE, which is what ED and the poisons service themselves are working from. This is where the registration lag really bites: no account means no access at exactly the hour you need it, and since the shared-login retirement there is no borrowing your way around it.¹⁴ Register in induction week. The app's offline search is the reason to have it on the phone rather than relying on the ward computer, where the previous shift is still logged in and the browser wants a password nobody knows.¹⁵

The registrar wants a number before they will take the referral

MDCalc covers most of them — it is free, the account is free, it works offline, and it is genuinely comprehensive at over nine hundred calculators.⁴ The honest caveat is that it is built in New York for an American audience, so some entries and unit conventions are not the ones a UK team asks for, and a few of the scores a UK registrar wants are buried under US billing-era names.⁵

Our calculators are the UK set — CURB-65 before the respiratory referral, Glasgow-Blatchford before you ring endoscopy, Wells, the 4AT on a confusion review — and they stop deliberately at the score and the bands. They will not tell you what to do with the number — deliberately. In the UK, software that interprets a score and tells you what to do with it is heading into regulated medical-device territory, and a reference page has no business there. The interpretation is the conversation you are about to have with the registrar.

You need to log it before you forget

Horus or Turas is where the SLEs, procedures and reflections have to end up — Horus for every foundation school in England, Turas for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — and ARCP is where the gaps show.²¹ Nobody reconstructs August accurately in May. Neither is really an app; both are browser logins, and Horus emails a code at every sign-in, which is worth knowing before you try to do it one-handed on a ward round.

Our logbook is a tally you tap during the shift so you know what to write up later. It is not the e-portfolio and does not talk to it — the entry still gets typed into Horus or Turas — it just means the entry exists somewhere other than your memory.

Reading up properly is a different job

The apps above are for the middle of a shift. Reading up — on the condition you admitted yesterday, the drug you had not met, the presentation that unsettled you — is a different job with different tools, and it mostly happens on a sofa with wifi, which changes what matters.

BMJ Best Practice and NICE CKS through the OpenAthens login are the workhorses, and they are free to you as NHS staff.¹⁶ Neither needs to live on your home screen; both need the login to work, which is why the OpenAthens registration sits in the induction-week list above.

We run free live webinars in the same spirit — sessions for incoming FY1s with the questions answered on the night, written up afterwards so the notes are readable whether you came or not. And for the July version of this reading — what to sort before August rather than after a shift — our guide on how to prepare for FY1 is the companion page to this one.

Where ours fits, and what it is not

This is our page, so treat this entry with the scepticism a publisher writing about itself deserves. bleep.guide is an unofficial handbook written by UK resident doctors: clerking plans for what you admit at 2am, ward-cover scenarios for the bleeps that come after everyone senior has gone home, the calculators and logbook above, and the webinars, which are free and not gated. It is not in the app stores by design: it is a web app, so it runs on almost any device that can reach the internet — any phone, the ward computer, the ancient iPad in the doctors' office — and installs to a phone's home screen from the browser. The handbook itself is a subscription after a trial.

Who is behind it: it is written and run by UK resident doctors with recent experience of the job it describes, and the content is regularly reviewed. The same vetting questions above apply to us as to anyone.

The case for it is the same case this whole page makes against generic references: the job is local and out-of-hours, and the pages are organised by the bleep you just received rather than by the specialty a textbook would file it under. What it is not: a drug reference — that is the BNF. Your trust's guidelines — nobody outside your trust can know your local antimicrobial policy, and anyone who guesses at it should worry you. Official — nothing here comes from the Foundation Programme, the GMC, a deanery or your employer. Or a substitute for asking the SHO, who remains the fastest and best tool available to you all year.

How to judge a clinical app in ninety seconds

The list above will go stale — this page's own history proves it, given how much of it has been renamed or retired since the versions of it circulating last year. So the durable skill is the vetting, not the list. Four questions sort almost everything:

Who wrote it, and is their name on it? The BNF is published by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society; iResus by the Resuscitation Council; the trust guidelines by your own microbiologists. A clinical reference that will not tell you who stands behind it is asking for trust it has not earned — and that applies whether the content is good or not, because you have no way to know which.

When was it last checked, and does it say so? An app updated three years ago is carrying three-year-old medicine. The honest ones date their content; the rest leave you to infer it from the store listing's "last updated" line, which tracks the software rather than the clinical text and flatters both.

Does it name its sources? A page that cites NICE, a guideline, a trial, can be checked. A page that states doses with no provenance has to be taken on faith, and faith is not a basis for a prescription. This is also the fastest tell for content quietly written for another country's system.

Does it work in flight mode? The test from the top of this page, and the one that disqualifies the most candidates. Check before you are relying on it.

Anything that passes all four is worth a home-screen audition, whoever makes it — including whatever replaces half this list by next August.

Revision apps are not ward apps

Question banks, flashcards, PSA practice, the exam-technique platforms, the paid generic handbooks: good tools, wrong list. Every competing page pads its count with them, which is how you end up with sixteen apps installed and no idea which one to open when the bleep goes.

The distinction: a revision app answers what might they ask me, and a ward app answers what do I do about the patient in front of me. Confusing the two lists is how a phone ends up organised for the exams you have already passed.

For what it is worth, the revision tools people actually use are a short list too. Passmedicine and Quesmed for question banks, Pastest for the same with a longer pedigree, Anki for spaced repetition — with the shared FY1 decks doing years of service — and the official practice papers for the PSA, which are the closest thing to the real exam's interface. All good at what they do. None of them will help you at 3am with a real patient, which is the whole point of keeping the two lists separate: revision tools in a folder on the second screen, ward tools where your thumb lands.

What not to keep on your phone

No patient-identifiable detail in general messaging apps. No photographs of a drug chart, an ECG, a wound or the handover sheet in your camera roll — handover sheets get shredded at the end of the shift, not photographed. NHS England's guidance on messaging in clinical settings is to minimise identifiable patient information on personal devices, and no messaging tool has been nationally endorsed for clinical use.²²

Find out at induction which messaging system your trust actually sanctions, and take seriously that a WhatsApp group being universal on your ward is not the same as it being approved. If there is no sanctioned tool and the group chat is genuinely how the ward runs, that is a question to put to your educational supervisor rather than a norm to absorb — patient-identifiable data on a personal phone is the most easily avoided incident of a first month, and the person it lands on is rarely the person who started the group.

And lock the phone properly — passcode and biometrics. It now carries clinical tools and work logins, and it spends twelve hours a day in a busy building full of strangers.

Questions people actually ask

Do I need to pay for anything? No. Everything on the core list is free to you — free outright, free with the NHS email, or paid for by your employer. The only paid items on this page are optional handbooks, and nothing about the job requires one. If a list is steering you toward purchases in week one, check whose links it is using.

Is it unprofessional to look things up in front of patients? The opposite. Keeping reference material at the point of care is standard practice in every safety-critical industry, and the FY1 who checks the dose is the one doing it correctly. If it feels awkward, say what you are doing — "I'm just checking the dose" reads as careful, not as lost. The one variant worth avoiding is disappearing into the phone mid-conversation without a word.

Does this list change for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland? Mostly no — the BNF, iResus, TOXBASE and the trust-guidelines question are UK-wide. The two forks: the e-portfolio is Turas rather than Horus outside England,²¹ and in Scotland the BMJ resources come funded nationally rather than through a local OpenAthens arrangement.¹⁷ Local health boards also vary more in which guideline platform they use, which makes the ask-at-induction rule more important, not less.

What about a smartwatch or an iPad? Neither earns a place in the first month. The phone is the clinical tool because it is always in the pocket; a tablet is for the sofa reading, and a watch that buzzes with the group chat mid-examination is a cost, not a tool. Get the phone right first.

Do I have to use my own phone for this? No — nothing obliges you to put work tools on a personal phone, and trusts that expect point-of-care lookups without providing devices are quietly relying on the fact that everyone does. In practice almost everyone does, because the alternative is queueing for the ward computer. The line to hold is the one above: your tools on your phone, fine; patient-identifiable material on it, no.

What about asking an AI chatbot? For a clinical question mid-shift, it is the wrong tool three ways: slower than opening the BNF to the page you need, often vague exactly where you need it to be precise, and usually unreferenced — so you cannot check the answer without doing the original lookup anyway. It also does not know your trust's policy and answers with the same confidence when it is wrong. After the shift, for understanding a concept, used with a real source open beside it — reasonable. At the bedside — the BNF, the local guideline, or the SHO.

What actually goes wrong with all this in week one? Three things, all preventable in induction week: TOXBASE unregistered on the night of the first overdose, the BNF never opened on wifi so there is nothing on the phone when the signal drops, and the Eolas space request still sitting unapproved. Every one of them is a two-minute job in week one and a genuine problem at 3am — which is the entire argument for the install order at the top of this page.

My trust has its own app — does that change the list? It supplements it. A growing number of trusts publish an induction or handbook app of their own; where yours exists, it outranks every generic equivalent on this page for local questions, for the same reason the trust's antimicrobial policy outranks a national reference. The generic list is for everything your trust's own material does not cover.

The home screen, settled

BNF + BNFC, iResus, Eolas, Accurx, MDCalc on the first screen; everything else in a folder. Bring a power bank, because a phone doing clinical work all day is flat by mid-afternoon.

And if the phone fails anyway: the ward has a BNF on paper, switchboard has every number, and the SHO has done every one of these jobs this year. The phone makes the job faster. What makes you safe at it is the ward itself, and that part arrives in its own time whether or not you read pages like this one.

App names, prices, platforms and ownership were checked in July 2026 — the month this list goes stale fastest, since half of it renames itself every few years. bleep.guide is independent and unofficial: not published by the Foundation Programme, the GMC, a deanery or any trust, and nothing here replaces local policy, your induction or a senior.