2009 Press Releases

Oct
27-2009

SMS has major role to play for Swine Flu vaccination during postal strike

London, 26^th October 2009. From today GPs will be receiving deliveries of the Pandemrix vaccine and will begin contacting ‘at risk’ groups for Swine Flu vaccination appointments.

It was recently reported that there are fears that the backlog of post following the current Royal Mail strikes will affect the programme, resulting in ‘at risk’ groups missing their appointments and therefore delaying getting their vaccination. Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer has warned that thousands of people could miss appointments for their swine flu vaccine due to these postal strikes. [Read More]

Oct
22-2009

Greenwich patients benefit from text messages from their GPs

22 October 2009. Patients of GP practices in Greenwich will soon benefit from receiving text messages to support health promotion and patient ‘access’. NHS Greenwich has recently funded iPLATO Patient Care Messaging for 39 Greenwich surgeries. This new text messaging service aims to provide an effective communication channel for the support of health promotion campaigns such as Stop Smoking and also help reduce the number of missed GP appointments, by automated appointment reminders. [Read More]

Oct
9-2009

NHS Hammersmith and Fulham fight smoking with text messaging service

London, 8^th October 2009, An innovative scheme to use mobile technology to obtain a patient’s current smoking status and invite ‘quitters’ for Smoking Cessation services, has proved a great success in NHS Hammersmith and Fulham. NHS Hammersmith and Fulham have a smoking prevalence of 24.2% and are committed to cutting that number down every year. [Read More]