NHSmail

NHSmail is the national secure collaboration service for health and social care in England.

It was originally just an email platform - hence the name - but now includes a full suite of collaboration and productivity tools based on Microsoft Office 365, including:

• Outlook and Exchange for email and calendar
• Teams for instant messaging, video conferencing and document collaboration
• OneDrive for secure cloud-based file storage and sharing
• SharePoint for managing shared content, documents and tasks
• Office Online for editing online documents (Word), spreadsheets (Excel) and notes (OneNote)

Core services are funded centrally by us. Additional services, such as additional mailbox top-ups, can be funded locally.

For more details see NHSmail services.

Anyone who works for the NHS can use NHSmail, if their organisation has been approved to use the service.

This includes:

• GPs 
• doctors 
• nurses 
• midwives
• other clinical staff
• administrative and support staff
• social care workers
• pharmacists
• dentists
• NHS England delivery partners such as IT consultancies

This service is not mandated but it is strongly recommended for all NHS organisations in England.

NHSmail is used for a variety of purposes, including:

• sending and receiving patient records and other confidential information
• communicating with patients about their care
• sharing information with other healthcare professionals and staff
• collaborating on projects

For more information, see About NHSmail.

For further information on how this service works, see About NHSmail.

This service has been live since 2004.

Over 1.7m healthcare professionals and staff across the NHS use NHSmail to communicate with each other and with patients, safely and securely.

NHSmail is a gold service, meaning it is available and supported 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The Access policy defines who is entitled to a Department of Health and Social Care funded NHSmail email account and explains how to apply.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

MFA helps protect users by making it harder for someone else to sign in to their NHSmail account. Information for NHS organisations, local administrators and NHSmail users is available on the NHSmail MFA support page.

NHSmail service status

Up-to-date information on the status of NHSmail services and any key known issues affecting users.

NHSmail support site

Access training and guidance materials for NHSmail.

The secure email standard

Emails sent to and from health and social care organisations must meet the secure email standard (DCB1596) so that everyone can be sure that sensitive and confidential information is kept secure.

NHSmail use by NHS Digital: GDPR information

Why and how we process your data within NHSmail, and your rights.