The head of HR in the NHS has admitted the health service will miss its September target for having all staff covered by the Agenda for Change (AfC) pay system.
Speaking exclusively to Personnel Today, Andrew Foster said that if the “vast majority” of work is done by the end of September, then he would be happy.
Serious questions remain as to how close NHS Employers will come to hitting its target. As of the end of the April, only 21% of NHS staff had been assimilated on to the AfC.
“That’s a little disappointing compared to where we want to be,” Foster said at last week’s ‘HR in the NHS’ conference in Birmingham.
“This year has been a hellish year for HR, but you have to grit your teeth and get on with it,” he said. “We owe it to the image of HR and we owe it to our staff to achieve implementation by September.”
Foster said it was right that the health service had set itself a “stretching” target, but confessed it was more stretching than it should have been. He likened implementing the AfC to scaling K2, saying it was an unprecedented HR project, and the biggest pay scheme in the world.
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