Enabling staff movement

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (June 2023) supports easier movement of staff between NHS organisations through tools such as the NHS Digital Staff Passport 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 (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, make digital staff passports available to all staff and ensure that workforce systems across the health and care system are interoperable, 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

NHS digital staff passport

The NHS Digital Staff Passport is supporting the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (June 2023) and is further supported in action 34 of The future of NHS human resources and organisational development report calling for organisations and ICS CPO’s to ‘implement digital staff passports, to enable seamless moves between teams and organisations’, and in success measure four in the ‘What Good Looks Like’ (WGLL) programme, which outlines how organisations are to ‘Promote the use of systems and tools to enable frictionless movement of staff across the ICS – allowing staff from different organisations to work flexibly and remotely where appropriate’.

Interim COVID-19 NHS Digital Staff Passport

In May 2020 the COVID-19 Digital Staff Passport was launched, which aided the simple movement of staff on a temporary basis to support the COVID-19 response. At its peak during the pandemic it was implemented in 105 NHS organisations with over 1000 passports issued to staff, enabling the safe and rapid movement of staff on a temporary basis between NHS organisations. This interim solution enabled the secure transfer of key staff’s details and employment information, to avoid repeat employment checks were they to be temporarily deployed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recovery of services.

This interim passport has provided the cornerstone to establishing passporting across the NHS and has enabled the programme to progress towards the next iteration of NHS Digital Staff Passport which is currently under development.

New NHS Digital Staff Passport

Building upon the success of the interim COVID-19 Digital Staff Passport the Enabling Staff Movement Team, alongside its delivery partners, has now started work on building the next iteration of the product. The NHS Digital Staff Passport is now at an early phase of its pilot with a few NHS organisations.

The pilot is focussed on designing a product and service to meet two use cases; the rotations of resident doctors and temporary staff movements i.e. for those who hold a substantive contract and are looking to support or pursue opportunities at another NHS organisation(s) whilst retaining their substantive post e.g. honorary contracts, secondments, clinical network arrangements (please note this excludes temporary workers such as bank staff, these will be introduced at a later stage of the roadmap).

The NHS Digital Staff Passport currently in development will be a service that allows staff members to hold their essential information – including personal, employment, skills and occupational health. So, when staff want to move between NHS organisations, they can quickly and securely transfer the information that’s required, without duplicate form filling, checks and training making the whole onboarding experience easier, faster, and less repetitive.

This is the next stage of our journey towards our long-term ambition to deliver an NHS Digital Staff Passport for every NHS staff member to support and facilitate a wider range of staff movements.

For more information please visit the NHS Digital Staff Passport website.