Heartbeat: Neurophysiology are future proof with phased out fax

June 25, 2019

Following on from Health and Social Care Secretary, Matt Hancock ordering the phasing out of fax machines in the NHS by April 2020, our neurophysiology department has taken the brave step in pulling the plug on their fax machine a year early.

The fax machine in neurophysiology was finally switched off on 31 March, however many colleagues were initially apprehensive explained Sally Walters, Lead Clinical Scientist: “The medical secretaries were the most apprehensive because they have to send reports to wards at the end of the working day and many wards don’t have NHS email addresses.”

However this changed when a secure email address for all inpatient investigations was set up allowing secretaries to send reports quickly and securely.

Sally added: “Before email they had to follow safe haven faxing procedures and call wards to check they had received the report. This was extremely time–consuming because staffing levels were reduced at these times and they had to wait a long time before the phone was answered.” The core reason for having a fax machine in neurophysiology was to receive referrals and send reports. This was historically for internal referrals and external referrals from GPs and other trusts across the region. But over the last two years, the department have developed a departmental email address and have been receiving and increase of referrals since.

In addition to this, working alongside the communications team, neurophysiology have developed electronic referrals for internal requests which are also submitted to the teams email address and the team have started manually uploading inpatient reports to CDA.

Sally believes there are numerous benefits to ditching the fax machine: “The majority of our processes have now become more secure, safer, faster and accurate since the switch off. Queries on referrals can now be addressed with a quicker response time because we can email back people directly. This has resulted in an increased output across the department which can only be an advantage for us.”