Each year millions of people in the UK visit their GP surgery for a flu jab. Many respond to the individual letters sent out by surgeries across the country inviting patients to receive the jab. Others are persuaded to visit their local GP thanks to the widespread TV and press campaigns that run each year.

Whatever finally prompts people to attend their surgery, the annual flu jab is a part of a well-orchestrated communications campaign that covers the whole country. But it’s expensive in terms of administration, postage and advertising. And even so, some people still miss out.

One surgery is looking to technology to help improve the numbers of people who receive their annual inoculation.  Instead of writing to patients, GPs at the Blackheath Medical Centre in the Wirral send emails and texts instead. And it’s done using NHSmail – the secure national email and directory service for NHS staff in England and Scotland.

“We make use of the NHSmail service to email and text patients when our annual stocks of influenza vaccinations arrive,” said Dr Bennett Quinn, one of three GPs at the Blackheath Medical Centre.

“We have contact details for about a quarter of our flu jab target patients and it gets the annual vaccination process off to a good quick start when these patients respond to their electronic invitation.”

It’s a simple yet highly effective solution to the problem of contacting patients at the practice. What’s more, sending text messages is free as part of the NHSmail service.

“NHSmail has undoubtedly saved the practice money,” said Dr Quinn. “Just looking at the annual influenza vaccination campaign, sending texts costs us nothing and means that staff time is more efficiently used on those who need a bit more chasing up.”

The SMS and email alert service has proved so popular Dr Quinn is now examining ways to relay weather warnings to patients who suffer from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases (COPD) such as chronic bronchitis and emphysema. It’s this kind of innovative thinking that is taking the NHS’ email service to a new level.

NHSmail is maintained and operated by Cable&Wireless on behalf of Connecting for Health (CfH) – the IT arm of the NHS. It’s the only email service approved by the Department of Health. And it is endorsed by the British Medical Association and Royal College of Nursing for the exchange of patient-identifiable data between NHSmail accounts.

At its heart, NHSmail is an enterprise-wide email service available to everyone in the NHS. As well as offering a range of features - such as enabling staff to send a mix of email, fax and SMS text messages – it also comes complete with a full electronic calendar that can be shared with colleagues across the NHS. And it provides access to an NHSmail directory that contains the professional contact details of all staff in the NHS.

The benefit of this collaborative tool is that clinicians can seek the expertise of others regardless of where they are in the country. This is helping to create “virtual communities” where knowledge, expertise and different working practices can be shared among those in similar areas of medicine and administration.

For Dr Quinn, though, the ability to communicate electronically is paramount, opening up a whole new range of possibilities.

“For instance, our anticoagulant management software can send texts, faxes and emails to our warfarin patients using NHSmail,” said Dr Quinn.

“The wording of the message is created by the program, thus practically eliminating the risk of human error in the dosage instructions. We are collecting data to assess the safety of this but anecdotally there have been no adverse incidents so far. About 40% of our warfarin patients receive their dosing instructions this way. One chap in his 70s got his grandchildren to teach him how to view text messages - just so he could use the service.

“We also make good use of the fax and SMS services too. Being able to fax an urgent referral or admission letter straight from the PC is really useful. We can also send standard emails or SMS messages to patients using the practice intranet – especially useful when you want to give good news that a test is normal or improved.”

For Will Moss, the Head of the NHSmail Programme at CfH, hearing how Dr Quinn is using the service to communicate with colleagues and patients underlines the importance of all the technological changes happening throughout the NHS.

“Some people dismiss NHSmail as ‘just another email system’, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said. “NHSmail is a fantastic application that provides NHS staff with the communications tools to carry out their jobs more effectively.  The feedback from users is that NHSmail is a must-have tool that improves communications between health professionals and, in turn, provides better care for patients.”

He’s right. Just ask Dr Quinn.