400,000 nurses to be registered on Contact

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.