500 000 email accounts have been registered in the National Health System's email (NHSmail) service since the beginning of February 2010, and over half a billion emails have been sent since its launch in April 2009.

As stated at the NHSmail website, NHSmail is a secure email, calendar, directory, fax and SMS service available to all NHS staff in England and Scotland, for exchanging patient data with other NHSmail and the Government Secure intranet (GSi) users.

The NHSmail team began migrating 350 000 existing users to a new service in January 2009; the migrations were completed successfully by the end of March 2009 and since then the take up of the new service has been proved to be an effective online tool.

More encouraging is the rapidly growing interest at organisational level, with an increasing number of trusts committing to switch off their local email services and move entirely to NHSmail.

In November 2009, a pilot project to prove the NHSmail organisation migration tools and processes was completed successfully with the migration of the Weston Area Health Trust to NHSmail, an organisation of 1 800 staff who were previously running their own email service solution. The completion of the pilot is good news for the other organisations waiting to move across to NHSmail and testing is currently underway on tools developed to migrate organisations that still use locally provided email services.

Next on the list for migration are the Sussex Health Informatics Service (Sussex HIS) organisation, which will be migrated to NHSmail within February 2010, followed by the Royal Wolverhampton Hospital Trust and the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead in the near future.

The NHSmail migration team has been working with suppliers to provide the tools which will allow organisation migrations to be carried out in order to fulfil the growing demand.

The Head of the NHSmail Programme, Will Moss said: "NHSmail (...) is now accepted as a viable alternative to local email services and we must now realise the benefit of running one national service in place of thousands of local ones. This will not only save the NHS valuable budget but will help to facilitate faster and more secure communication between clinicians, in order to ensure better patient care."

Further information:

• Original news article - NHS Connecting for Health
• NHSmail

Note: Crown copyright material reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO.