About Berkshire Shared Services (BSS)

Berkshire Shared Services (BSS), hosted by Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, provides a wide range of non-clinical support services to the NHS and other public sector bodies across England. As part of its work BSS is responsible for IT services for 109 general practice (GP) surgeries in Berkshire which serve the healthcare needs of almost one million people.

Berkshire Shared Services (BSS) is celebrating the successful completion of a major long-term project that cuts the cost of IT and improves the efficiency of running general practice (GP) surgeries. The project to migrate 108 GP surgeries in Berkshire to NHSmail was completed at the end of March 2010 delivering a standard messaging solution across the county.

108 GP Practices in Berkshire now use NHSmail. The decision to move to NHSmail – which is provided by NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH) and run by Cable&Wireless Worldwide – saves Berkshire East and Berkshire West Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) £150,000 a year.

"We had a lot of obsolete infrastructure that was well past its sell-by date," said Andy Ferrari,  Primary Care IT Manager, Berkshire Shared Services. "Rather than invest £7,000 or £8,000 in each GP Practice for new equipment we decided to go with NHSmail instead."

"Our project began in January 2006 when we evaluated the use of NHSmail. We concluded that it was a feasible alternative to our existing system and promptly carried out pilots in two practices," said Andy.

The success of these initial pilots provided the catalyst for the project which saw a swift initial roll-out of NHSmail to around 40% of GP practices. That said, some were hesitant about such a change.

"People expected to see servers on-site and when they didn't they were a bit nervous" said Andy. "But this soon changed. The transition to NHSmail was not the traumatic experience that the practices imagined and this enabled us to embark on implementation with a minimal amount of hitches."

Part of that was helped by the professionalism of the project team which engaged with GP Practices to ensure full transparency.

Said Chris Walsh, Senior Project Officer, BSS: "We went out to the GP Practices and provided an overview of NHSmail including its key features such as free SMS. In the early days we provided reassurance about its reliability and its flexibility and produced documentation and a checklist to help smooth the transition. We learned a lot from the early transitions and this helped us to address the needs and concerns of GPs."

Indeed, the manual migrations carried out by BSS were straightforward and quick. Typically, a migration for a small practice was completed in a morning. A larger practice might take a day. Either way, disruption was minimal and the feedback from users speaks volumes.  

"The positive comments about this project from Practice staff have been considerable," said Andy. "The biggest benefit for us is the in-built confidentiality of NHSmail. The data is secure and encrypted and means that sharing information is much more user friendly.

"The free fax service allows people to fax from the desktop and this has cut costs in terms of telecoms and printing. SMS is great too. Practices are using these to send appointment reminders to patients. Although we have no independent data the anecdotal evidence is that the number of DNAs (did not attend) has reduced," he said.

Indeed, the flexibility of the system was demonstrated early in 2010 when the arctic conditions which swept the UK meant that many people were unable to commute to work. Thanks to NHSmail and the fact that it can be accessed securely using any Internet connection, staff were still able to work from home even if they couldn't travel to their practice – something that wouldn't have been possible before.

Looking back, Andy is rightly pleased with recent achievements. "This was a long-term project that lasted four years," said Andy. "But unlike many projects, this had a beginning and an end. It was a job well done, with happy users, proven features, cost savings and a range of benefits."