Enabling staff movement

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (June 2023) supports easier movement of staff between NHS organisations to minimise unnecessary duplication of employment checks and mandatory training. This is to foster an agile and highly skilled NHS workforce through providing opportunities for the expansion of skills and career development, and to offer flexibility to help transform the delivery of services.

The NHS’s clear ambition is to simplify and modernise staff movement to meet the current and future needs of its workforce and service, and is supported by the vision of the Enabling Staff Movement programme:

‘Our people feel empowered and able to move easily across the NHS to enhance the delivery of care to patients’

The Enabling Staff Movements programme is focused on delivering solutions to ease the movement of staff across the NHS, and to improve their experience as they move, to enable staff to be simply and quickly released to deliver care at the earliest opportunity.

With national partners, we are working collectively to break down unnecessary bureaucracy, promote standardisation of policies, processes, and systems, and reduce administrative burden on NHS staff and corporate services teams (human resources (HR), recruitment, training and occupational health). This will improve the onboarding and induction experience overall, enabling staff to be released quicker to care for patients. This will also improve the quality of workforce data in the NHS and promote recognition of previous training and occupational health immunisations and vaccinations and will improve the overall efficiency and experience when staff move.

This is achieved by:

  • establishing standards and agreements between organisations so that organisations can accept the checks completed and the training delivered by others;
  • securely passporting verified records of previous employment and training between organisations, in accordance with data privacy and GDPR rules, so that the receiving organisation can rely on that information and not need to repeat certain checks and training.
Ultimately, the Enabling Staff Movement programme aims to promote the use of lead employer models, establish standards, and ensure that workforce systems across the health and care sector are interoperable by utilising nationally defined data standards. This will enable our people to work more flexibly and move more easily and safely between our organisations.

Outlined below are some of the key projects delivered by the Enabling Staff Movements programme:

Enabling staff movement toolkit

The Enabling Staff Movement (ESM) toolkit sets out a framework for all the various staff movements that occur across the health and care sector. It provides guidance on temporary staff movements, with signposts to comprehensive NHS Employers guidance on setting up workforce sharing agreements.

The toolkit was first launched in August 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic saw rapid adoption of workforce sharing agreements (often referred to as workforce MOUs), to address the increased health and care pressures that resulted.

We reviewed several examples of local agreements and have now updated the toolkit to include a national template, a regional template and a template for when NHS workers need to be deployed into care providers for short periods, for example during emergencies.

The ESM toolkit contains links to the following annexes:

  1. Annex A: Sample warranty text
  2. Annex B: Record of discussion
  3. Annex C: NHS to care providers COVID-19 agreement
  4. Annex D: London staff movement agreement
  5. Annex E: Workforce sharing agreement template