Joe’s view: NHSmail

I’m sitting on the back of a boat typing this. I have been coming to Dalyan in Turkey for 20 years now, for a large part of that time Fiona and I ran a holiday business here www.dalyanvillas.com, on which we cut our IT teeth.

Ahmet, our captain, is steering the boat to the next bay for a swimming stop and a barbecue.

We are having a great day on the boat: 34 degrees in the shade.  An elderly fisherman in another boat in the bay has lost his anchor. Ahmet stops our boat, whips off his T shirt, quickly puts on his goggles and snorkel and dives down 20 feet to the sea floor to retrieve it.

I am reminded of a similar incident 20 years ago, when his father performed a similar feat of casual awesomeness, leaving all the pale , flabby Englishmen on the boat feeling slightly inadequate and their wives slightly breathless.

Nice seats, delicious food, wi-fi

Every year the boat is a little better. Nicer cushions one year, a new bar the next. Whenever we turn up for a boat trip it’s the same picture, Ahmet is polishing some part of the boat.

 Ahmet is passionate about delivering the best customer experience that he can. There are many day excursion boats in Dalyan and competition is fierce but Ahmet’s is the best.

Ahmet is an early adopter of technology. The first year that we took an iPod with us he immediately realised that it would allow his customers to have the music they wanted on the boat.

His fee for our next family boat trip? An iPod. Give the customer what they want. The customer is always right.

Not only is the boat immaculate, the food is fantastic too. This boat is, in my humble opinion , the best restaurant in the world: and TripAdvisor agrees with me. 

Ahmet is very keen that people give online feedback and he takes seriously all suggestions for improving his customers’ experience.

This year’s improvement is wi-fi. Yes, the boat has wi-fi. Boats have wi-fi? Yes. Relatively small Turkish day excursion boats have wi-fi.

Ahmet has an all you can eat 4G data package on his waterproof (obviously) Sony smartphone from which he can share an internet connection with his passengers.

I can access my NHS mail account right here on the boat. Or, at least, I thought I could but, unusually, NHSmail has fallen over today.

NHSmail: what the NHS wants?

Ahmet hands me a cold beer. Logging into the CCIO Network’s online discussion forum I see the NHSmail failure has kicked off a debate about NHSmail and whether trusts want to go through all the pain of transferring from trust-based email to NHSmail 2. The answer is largely “no”.

I have been a regular user of NHSmail since its inception. That’s because, despite the comedy inbox size, it has a really useful directory and the ability to send fax and text messages.

These latter two functionalities have seemingly dropped out of scope unless you want to pay extra; although the inbox size has grown to 4 Gigabytes. Is this what the customer asked for?

The idea behind NHSmail is that it is secure: but how secure do we need it to be? We routinely send sensitive information, discharge summaries and the like, via second class post. Where is the campaign to have second class post encrypted by Enigma coding machines?

Yet any Caldicott Guardian will tell you it’s a relatively common mishap for second class post to be opened by someone other than the intended recipient; even a neighbour if one keystroke is wrong by the typist.

NHSmail: what the patient wants?

Many NHS patients would be happy to receive their correspondence by email and save some of the £79 million a year that the NHS spends on postage.

You have probably already opted out of having a paper bank statement. Increasingly, your email address is your go-to address; more permanent and more secure than your actual geographical address.

And yet it is not a demographic routinely collected by the NHS. Surely this has to change.

If we routinely collected the email address of the patient, we could routinely ask the patient for feedback about the service they have received from the NHS.

Patients could then single out the best and the worst of the NHS in the same way that TripAdvisor can rate the boatmen of Dalyan.

Currently, it is mainly only the very angry that go online to rate the service they have received from the NHS using services like NHS Choices. If we had the patients email address we could automate the collection of feedback and get much more of it.

I suspect that the NHS can no longer afford its love affair with the Post Office and it is in the NHS Standard Contract that we must abandon the fax machine by 1 October http://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/7-nhs-contrct-tech-guid-fin.pdf .

If we are to insist on special secret squirrel email for NHS business, then every citizen is going to need an NHSmail address; in which case can we afford NHSmail 3?

Or do we go with the patient’s choice of email system? Do we go with the trusts’ choice of email system? What would Ahmet say? The customer is always right.