Generally, should email be used by clinicians as a means of therapeutic communication with patients?
You should check and follow the local policies and procedures at your workplace in relation to email communication. Emails are generally only used to facilitate administrative information exchange, rather than as a means of therapeutic communication with patients.
If clinical communication to patients using a work email address does occur, there should be safeguards in place to ensure that any urgent matters are directed elsewhere if the clinician is on leave or outside their working hours and there’s a process for any clinically relevant information to be transferred from email to the person’s health care record (eMR) so information is not lost.