The UK’s largest integrated HR and payroll system – the NHS Electronic Staff Record (ESR) has added the 500,000th NHS employee onto the ‘live’ system.
When complete, all 1.2 million NHS employees – about 7% of the UK workforce will be paid by ESR, which is being delivered by healthcare IT systems company McKesson.
The £300m project is part of a programme of change and innovation within the NHS – and is designed to transform the way the NHS delivers both payroll and HR services to its employees.
Until recently, the UK’s 620 trusts had been operating with 67 separate HR and payroll systems, each of which recorded workforce data in a slightly different way.
This, combined with the fact that many trusts have different rates of pay and procedures for overtime pay, and that more than 10% of the workforce move between trusts each year, was resulting in payroll inaccuracies, out-of-date HR information and general duplication and inefficiencies due to the manual re-keying of data.
More than 270 trusts are currently live on ESR, including the three initial pilot sites at NHS trusts in King’s Lynn in Norfolk, Newham Health in London and in North East Wales.
Over the next 18 months, the remaining 382 NHS organisations and 700,000 NHS employees will go live on ESR.
Jim O’Connell, programme director for ESR, said: “The Electronic Staff Record is an integral part of the wider and ambitious initiative to modernise the NHS.
