NHSMail

From 9th November 2020, under the NHS Terms of Service, contractors must ensure their staff have access to, and are able to send and receive NHSmail from, the pharmacy shared NHSmail mailbox. To meet this requirement, contractors must ensure that at least two members of staff at the pharmacy premises have live personal NHSmail accounts that are linked to the shared mailbox.

Contractors will therefore need to ensure that:

• they have a shared NHSmail mailbox for each of their pharmacy premises, which meets the pharmacy.ODScode@nhs.net naming convention;
• those staff that will need to send and receive NHSmail from the shared mailbox have live personal NHSmail accounts which are linked to the shared mailbox;
• there are sufficient staff with linked personal NHSmail accounts to ensure that the shared mailbox can always be accessed when the pharmacy is open, including when locums are acting as the responsible pharmacist;
• staff are reminded of the need to regularly check the shared NHSmail account and respond accordingly to emails that have been received; and
• the linked personal NHSmail accounts are regularly reviewed so that where staff leave the employment of the contractor, their personal NHSmail account is unlinked from the shared NHSmail account in order to avoid any data breaches.

For more information on the requirements around NHSMail along with resources around management within the pharmacy please access the PSNC website.

Contractors should note that important information including Gateway messages from NHSE, GP-CPCS, DMS and Hypertension Case Finding Service referrals along with important messages from the ICS and your LPC will be sent via this route. It is therefore imperative that the premises account is regularly accessed and there is always at least one staff member present on any given day that can access the mailbox otherwise important information including time sensitive referrals will be missed.