For the first year after buying a Handspring handheld computer, I never used it and thought that I had wasted my money. However, when I started as a surgical house officer it became a useful tool, allowing me to dispense with paper patient lists and avoid the tedious task of continually having to print up to date versions. Conveniently it also holds my hospital telephone numbers.

At first I tried using a specialised medical program, 'Patient Keeper.' However, I soon decided that it was too complicated for my purposes and switched to using the basic 'Memo Pad'program that comes with all Palm-type handhelds.

Learning the special way to draw letters was much easier than I expected. But annoyingly I do have to keep spare batteries in my locker for times when I get the message 'insert new batteries immediately to avoid losing your data.'Another frustration as I write jobs into my handheld during the ward round is that I must simultaneously copy them into the patient's notes. There was also a half hour of exasperation when I temporarily mislaid my handheld somewhere in the hospital.

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli has shared many of my experiences and also pushed further with his use of handheld computing by involving whole hospital teams. In one of three interesting case studies, six junior doctors speed up handover times by using the infra-red data beaming facility to share their team's task list.

One of his main recommendations is to keep things as simple as possible. He suggests managing patient lists with a program called 'hanDBase,'which can be bought over the internet for £20. He has also successfully used his handheld to read textbooks, make lecture notes, and keep a logbook.

The book is sincere and detailed. I felt as if I were discussing issues with a colleague who had been through many similar situations and was now suggesting how I could progress further. He even has a chapter on how to be polite to the hospital information technology staff. I found this particularly amusing, because my IT department refuses to allow me to back up my data by connecting to a hospital computer.

I would recommend to any doctor use of a handheld for managing patient lists. And I recommend this book for a down-to-earth account of the experience.

It will be interesting to see if handheld computers become commonplace in hospital medicine over the next few years, as Dr Al-Ubaydli insists they must. Doubtless this will be influenced by the new NHS 'IT tsar,'Richard Granger, and also competition from devices running Microsoft's TabletPC operating system. These have larger screen size, more advanced handwriting recognition, and the computing power of a laptop.

Dr Andrew Harrison, surgical house officer, west London.