Read Julie's take on why the NHS Number is so important to the midwives community, a real life account of how its use could've prevented an incident with a new born baby and other supporting testimonials.

Meet Julie

Julie Tindale

I have been a registered Nurse since qualifying as a Midwife in 1980 and have practiced in a variety of settings in hospitals and the community. I was commissioned as a Nursing Officer in Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service and have also worked in Germany as a Community Midwife for the Soldiers Sailors Airman's Families Assoication.

I worked for three years in Saudi Arabia as a Midwife for the National Guard. Most recently, I have worked in Birmingham for the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust.

I believe the NHS Number is a tool that should be universally adopted and actively used in health care settings. This will mean that as a unique patient identifier the NHS Number, which is issued to newborn babies will link their health care information throughout their life.

Better and safer care will result from the ability to connect information to any care, screening or monitoring across organisational boundaries.

What makes the NHS Number the ten most important digits within healthcare?

As nurses and midwives we must be certain who our patient is- then we can be confident that any medication, treatment, diagnostic test is entirely appropriate for that patient. The power of the NHS Number to uniquely identify a person is fundamental – our patients expect and trust us to get this right ‘first time and every time’.

Why not use a local ID number?

Many local systems, such as hospital Patient Administration Systems (PAS) and some GP Practice systems, use an internal patient number which is a unique reference for that patient’s records within that system but is not applicable to the patient outside of that local system.
 
The NHS Number is used throughout the NHS across all care settings and so allows all records for a patient to be joined up where appropriate. The ability to join up patient records to provide improved patient care is at the forefront of the Government’s plans for Health and Social Care (Liberating the NHS).

Why is this important now?

The fundamental changes to our NHS will have a major effect on where and when patients access health care. Care will be provided in diverse settings and may or may not be within current organisational structures. The NHS Number will provide the most reliable way of tracking an individual’s history, medications, investigations and previous events and ensuring we can bring all the information together to reach the right decisions.

Why us?

Anyone providing care: nurses, therapists, midwives, allied healthcare professionals and assistants must be able to use this powerful tool. GP’s have been comfortable with using the NHS number for many years, but traditionally most nurses and midwives have been content to leave this part of a patient’s identification profile to back room or administrative staff. This cannot continue, we are all under immense pressure to ‘do more for less and with less’, we are working under continual pressure in an extraordinarily complex and technically challenging environment.

More information about what the NHS Number looks like, who has one and how to find it is available in the staff section of the NHS Number web pages.

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Real life

Read Julie's account of how an incident with a newborn baby could have been avoided with an NHS Number.