NHSmail, a doctor’s tale

My existing email service is about to be discontinued, so it is fortuitous that the first application delivered by the National Programme is an "email address for life" for all NHS employees.

I enthusiastically typed http://www.nhs.net into Internet Explorer. This produced a message box asking for my password. But I had no password!

I then spent some time searching NHS web pages and Google for instructions on how to get one, but with no luck. Eventually I found a help line number (0870 2408123) and they explained that on the first occasion it was necessary to log in from a terminal within a hospital. Why was this simple piece of information not displayed on http://www.nhs.net, I wondered?

I began the process of registration which was straightforward. I found my name in a list of other Andrew Harrisons working for the NHS and entered a password. If you work for the NHS and have a common name I recommend doing this as soon as possible. If I had left it for a few more months, I may have found that, for life I would be addressed annoyingly as andrew.harrison2, or some other variant.

After registering I received an eight-letter "userID". The next day I tried to log in from home, but the server appeared to be down. There was no message to this effect, just some pages from Sun Microsystems giving advice for systems administrators. I phoned the help desk, but got an answering machine because it was the weekend. They did dutifully phone me back on Monday, and confirmed that the server had been off-line.

When I finally did log in from home, I discovered that I had to enter my userID and password three times before I could get to my emails. It is very irritating. I can remember my password easily enough, but I have also had to learn the userID – eight random letters not chosen by me. Was it beyond the abilities of EDS to design a system where my user name was my email address, and I only had to enter my password once?

The system not only allows one to send emails, but also SMS messages and faxes. Sending emails is like using Hotmail or, from a hospital computer, Outlook will connect to it. There is an in-built spellcheck, which I was particularly pleased to see. (However I soon discovered that it rejects most medical terminology. For example it rejects atenolol, augmentin, gentamicin and mri, though it does recognise penicillin.)

I have been trying to configure the system to use Outlook 2000. In order to do this I consulted the help pages. Confusingly there are three sets of help pages, depending on which button you press: one on the home screen, one on the email screen and one from a welcome email which you get sent (though in fact the web page, which this points to, no longer exists).

Eventually I found the instructions and followed them carefully. There is at least one mistake (where the text refers to a different diagram from the one shown, which is a repeat of a previous diagram). And I had to speak to the hospital IT department to open up the firewall.

So my first two weeks with my new email have not been entirely positive. A pitfall of discussing new software is that one tends to take its good points for granted and only notice its defects. However I am disappointed that in this £90m system. I have already encountered enigmatic steps in registration, technical problems and annoying aspects of design.

It is almost as if no one at EDS tried using the system in an objective manner. I am not surprised that so few doctors have taken up using it. Having said that, none of my immediate colleagues had even heard of it anyway, so at least EDS has time to sort out flaws before the number of users increases significantly!