400,000 nurses to be registered on Contact

Tags: A Community HIS iS London midwifery mobile Nursing RCN

30 Mar 2006

Connecting for Health has announced it is planning to ensure that every nurse in England as well as Scotland has their own e-mail address with NHS webmail service Contact.

All members of the Royal College of Nursing that work within the NHS, including agency staff with regular NHS employment, are to be bulk-registered automatically registered on Contact, a secure web-based e-mail system that allows staff to be contactable at a single address in the format 'username@nhs.net'.

Professor Christine Beasley, Chief Nursing Officer, told delegates at the Connecting for Health Nursing and Midwifery Conference in central London that she was pleased to announce the scheme, which is in its very early stages.

"We want to make sure that every nurse has an email address. That will be the address that will stay with you for your whole career."

Nurses would be able to either register online by browsing to www.nhs.net using a computer connected to N3, or, she explained: "The Royal College of Nursing is going to do that for you and will assign you your NHS email address."

The RCN said they were looking forward to being able to announce further details as soon as possible.

Contact bills itself as a secure hosted webmail service that allows users not only to receive and write email but faxes and text messages. It also features a shared calendar and directory service.

Connecting for Health's Will Moss, programme head for Contact, told E-Health Insider that the scheme was ambitious but possible. "This is the first time that anybody's doing anything of this scale. Some of this is new territory for everybody. But the service can be scalable and we can do it."

Moss explained that the system would develop further using RSS feeds from the National Electronic Library for Health. Nurses interested in particular areas, for instance, wound care, would be able to receive notifications of new publications from journals in that area in their inboxes.

The Contact service would be of particular use to peripatetic nurses, said Moss. The e-mail service is available over mobile devices and community and district nurses would benefit from having a single e-mail address they could access anywhere.

Roughly 400,000 nurses at the RCN are eligible for bulk registration. CfH's annual report last year reported that 124,000 users had registered with Contact; bulk registration of nurses would therefore act as a significant boost to the numbers.

Moss told E-Health Insider that his ambition was to register all of them although slightly less may end up on their books. The number of nurses who do actually use the service will be monitored.

Contact, which is supplied by Cable and Wireless, was unveiled at the end of 2004. The previous system, NHSMail, developed by EDS, was shut down at the beginning of 2004 after low take-up and accusations of unreliability by staff.

Readers Comments

They are already registered!

grant.addison@glos.nhs.uk

30 Mar 06 06:26

All staff employed by NHS organisations are already "registered" so not sure what else this achieves - other than adding an email address that they probably won't use - or is the objective simply to boost the numbers registered! I suspect that many will already have a Trust email address. I think the real question is how many of the 124,000 registered users are active users - logging on at least twice a week? Perhaps EHI could ask!?! Sorry to be cynical!

Some random thoughts

30 Mar 06 08:50

Should be an easy target to meet - enterprises like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail provide millions of email addresses annually. But .... Where is the cost benefit analysis here, and why nurses in particular ? What proportion of the 400,000 nurses have ready access to computers? Isn't this just a "big figure" target that CfH believes it might actually achieve?

Good initiative!, but?

stephane.guegan@nhs.net

30 Mar 06 10:11

Since Trusts have alread started to register member of staffs (therefore nurses) in Contacts are we going to have the situation whereby nurses are listed twice?

Why ?

30 Mar 06 11:25

This seems quite clearly a waste of time and money when trusts already provide this. Surely CFH should be concentrating their resources and ideas into the national programme rather than flouncing around with basic email !!!!?????? Sometimes, I despair of it all.

Spare a thought for the local helpdesks ..

30 Mar 06 12:56

At present we (PCT and Acute shared IT service) provide a reliable and easy to access locally hosted secure email service along with proper integration to calendar functions and other collaboration tools such as SharePoint. This includes access from outside our WAN and the internet via a secure VPN.

In my experience, Contact has so far proved to be slow, unreliable and problematic to administer locally - the thought of several hundred nurses calling the helpdesk following the bulk registration fills me with dread.

This seems to me to be a cynical move to demonstrate take up of the one CfH product that is fully live and working (albeit hardly stable, in my opinion). After all, given the number of free hosted web mail systems out there on the net running on exactly the same platform as Contact this was one that even CfH could hardly fail to make work.

NATIONAL E-MAIL FOR A NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

31 Mar 06 07:53

It should be made mandatory for all NHS staff, granted it has it's faults but we are all one organistaion so wy should Trusts waste valuable cash on e-mail software and servers every time there is a reorganisation - treat the patients and stop bleating about whether or not the emial address has the trust name in it or not. Mind you it would be nice to see CfH staff use it too !! I've used Contact since it's EDS days and have had no problems with it at all....must be one of the lucky ones eh ?

All one organisation?

31 Mar 06 09:21

Let's get real here . One of the major flaws in the centralist approach to NHS IT deployment is that "the NHS" does not exist as a legal entity. It's little more than a brand used by a myriad of disparate (and - where IT and its funding is concerned - increasingly desperate) organisations.

Acceptable Use Policy?

31 Mar 06 15:57

Having been an LOA from EDS days, have cause for concern for the AUP. If the users are bulk registered, how will it be known that they comply to the AUP? The second step after click Register Here is the AUP and the Tick Box to agree. Will the users be required to send an email to register their compliance? On another note, the stability and usability of the system has caused concern within the GP community and as such, 2 Practices are still using Exchange 4 and refusing PCT staff access. Even the CfH webste has been rebranded to state "Contact- Clinical Communications" and not a Groupware solution. Is this admission that Contact is great as a Basic Email solution (e.g. Send and recieve... but even that has had its flaws), and not quite there to replace the current Groupware functionality of using shared diaries of multiple people to book meetings?

Trust IT depts

31 Mar 06 20:03

Our local acute trust IT department is paranoid about using NHS Contact (bandwidth type paranoia) that it has blocked access form any of its PCs. I love working in a nice joined up health service

Number of real users

03 Apr 06 11:58

I wonder how many staff out of the 124,000 use contact as their main email service or use it like many colleagues and I do - as a forwarding service from what is a national directory - which is no bad thing in itself.

If all nurses are registered in this way - at least this would provide a means to email either all Nurses or individual nurses alike - linked to their registration info. You could also see how this might develop into providing links into RBAC for NCRS access. Wouldn?t it be good for a nurse who is struck off the register for misconduct would be deleted from contact and RBAC automatically? Or will ESR become the master staff directory in the future to control all RBAC.

What I am really saying is don't we need a clear strategy that joins together a national staff directory, RBAC, ESR, the role of contact, the role of local GroupWare products, how they can coexist and be interfaced etc etc. Perhaps we could have a roadmap as in GP system of choice that starts with standards and interfacing and moves in time, when the central product provides current functionality, to a centrally hosted service. How sensible would that be !!

Legal entity

03 Apr 06 12:02

As usual the devil is in the deatil. The legal entity point is very very important. According to the Freedom of Information Act, email is part of the 'corporate memory' of an organisation. That means we are supposed to provide access to email correspondence if requested. You must also implement a proper disposal policy. You cant do that on the national email system as far as I can tell.

Legal entity (2)

03 Apr 06 15:27

I don't see why you can't apply FOI to Contact. The person belongs to an organisation, who has an account. The contents of the account can be requested by that organisation in response to FOI.

Sorted.

incorrect email adreeses

05 Apr 06 13:44

One of the main issues, as a Contact (sorry, NHS Mail!) user, is that with all staff having an ...@nhs.net email address, the issues around receiving incorrect mail are much greater. In an office of 5 people, 3 of us have received emails intended for other NHS staff who have the same names as us, but who work in different organisations.

Sourely, when NHS Net is intended for tranfer of confidential data due to its added encryption etc., this is a worry?

what about non-RCN nurses

05 Apr 06 15:52

What about all the nurses who are not in the RCN? Do they get signed up too? What about Midwives and Health Visitors etc etc? Is this the RCN just flexing its muscles, and more to the point....why?