From the 29 September 2026, the preferred system for sending clinical documents from Hillingdon Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to GP practices across Hillingdon borough will transition to the Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH). This national system is free of charge for NHS organisations and will significantly improve patient safety by ensuring that documents reach your practice swiftly and with far fewer delivery failures. The documents involved include clinic outcome letters, ED summaries, inpatient discharge summaries, and maternity discharge summaries. 

How this impacts your practice systems

Every single practice in the former NWL ICB boroughs is already technically set up to receive documents via MESH into EMIS or SystmOne. However, the impact of this change on your daily workflow depends entirely on the clinical systems you use: 

• SystmOne users & EMIS users without Docman: There is no change to how you currently receive, view, or manage your documents. 
• EMIS users with Docman: There will be a change to your internal processing workflows. To ensure your team is prepared and can manage this transition seamlessly, there is a step-by-step User Guide. Please share this with your administration and coding teams. 

System resilience and fallbacks 

While MESH will be the primary pathway for all capable practices, robust fallback measures are in place. In the event of a MESH system failure, document delivery will automatically revert to Docman Connect (the Trust-side version of Docman), or as a last resort, secure email or post. 

Please note: As practices may continue to receive documents from providers that use Docman, and given the fallback arrangements described above, practices should continue to routinely monitor Docman for incoming documents. This change has been approved by NWL primary care leadership and developed collaboratively with the NWL Acute Provider Group, who are leading on this change. If you experience any issues during this transition process (for example, your practice stops receiving any documentation from the local hospitals or duplicates of documents) please reach out to the West and North London ICB IT Helpdesk.