The NHS has tendered a £1.7bn contract for a new national workforce management system, in what amounts to a downgrading of previous ambitious plans to create a new HR and finance platform.
NHS Business Services Authority has published a contract notice for suppliers to bid on taking over the electronic staff record in 2025 for 10 years, with a five-year option to extend.
The successful supplier will be tasked with developing the new workforce management system, into which the ESR will transition when the contract with current provider IBM ends in 2025.
The software is used to – among other things – make payments every month to the NHS’s 1.8 million staff, equivalent to 5 per cent of the UK’s workforce.
It comes two years after NHS England began looking into procuring a single technology platform which would host both the ESR and other HR, financial and procurement functions, in a bid to improve the health service’s management and analytics. This work included asking three tech firms to demonstrate how such a platform would work.
However, the contract notice published earlier this week relates only to workforce and does not include other finance and procurement functions that NHSE was previously looking to merge into one mega-system.
The contract notice states: “The future NHS workforce solution will fulfil the ambition of providing the NHS with a user-centred digital workforce solution to empower people from both national and local organisations to carry out their roles effectively and efficiently, supporting them through their journey with the NHS.
“NHSBSA require a supplier to manage the ESR service, transform, develop, implement and manage a future NHS workforce solution and once migration of user organisations completes, decommission the ESR service.”
The successful provider must also deliver functions such as “end to end hiring experience”, performance management, and compensation and benefits”.
Read full article
Source: HSJ
Date: 30 August