NHSmail is the national secure email and collaboration service for health and social care in England.
It acts as the first step in the drive for deeper collaboration across health and social care by connecting the dental profession to other healthcare practitioners.
It is free to sign up to: the NHSmail portal will ask you to register a practice email address against which individual email addresses may be associated. This is designed to be a quick, easy and intuitive process; this has been verified by feedback received.
Effective dental care increasingly depends on the ability to operate in a context of collaborative care. Using NHSmail allows communication with other practitioners in a way that ensures patient confidential data is secure.
Referring patients to other healthcare providers has often been unnecessarily laborious and bureaucratic: paper forms to be completed and faxed (or worse, posted). This could require following up several times by telephone to ensure that it had been received and actioned.
Using NHSmail accounts allows a 'one stop shop' approach.
This also offers the opportunity for providers of unscheduled or Out of Hours (OOHs) dental care to easily and securely communicate with a patient's regular dental provider after an OOH treatment, to update the patient record.
General Dental Practitioner Mark Woodger of the Birchwood Dental Practice in Warrington said: "We welcome the rollout of NHSmail to dental practices. The service enables us to share information securely with other care providers; delivering benefits for our patients and our practice."
The full benefit of using NHSmail accounts will be realised when all dental providers have signed up and there is one secure system via which patient confidential data can be shared.
Dr Ian Bergin, Digital Project Lead
Office of the Chief Dental Officer for England
Registering for NHSmail - need support?
If you need any support registering for an NHSMail account please email their helpdesk or telephone 0333 200 1133.
NHS Digital have also produced a guide on 'How to complete the NHSmail dentistry registration portal'.
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