As part of the closure of the project a demonstration day was held at BMA house in London on February the first attended by the e-Envoy Mr Andrew Pinder. Over 70 decision makers, managers, GPs, practice managers and nurses attended from throughout the NHS. The work of the project was warmly received. The audience heard from frontline users of the system who reported it was easy to use and definitely better than traditional out of hours clinical feedback. They were shown examples of how real joined up working between General Practice and NHS direct was possible, four examples from just one practice in one week.

Mrs Linda Hicks, a practice manager from South London described how the system was user friendly, improving all the time and how it had abolished all of their OOH paperwork. The ability to reply was useful for temporary residents or patients not registered with the practice.

Sylvia Parritt, a NHS Direct Nurse advisor told the audience how NHS Direct Nurses appreciated the feedback they were getting form practices.

Dr Jon Rogers, representing Torex, called for clear directions from the DOH and NHS as to where the GP system suppliers should be moving. He compared the work of this project, which has delivered a whole suite of structured coded XML PKI encrypted messages between various organisations in the space of 2 years with that of the Pathology messaging program that after 13 years is just beginning to rollout an edifact message between pathology labs and GP surgeries.

The day was deemed a great success and we look forward to being able to assist the NHS in its modernisation agenda in the future.

For more detail on the day and the presentations shown, click this link.