Your ESR News

Update from the National Programme Director

Welcome to the December edition of ESR News. As I reflect on the last twelve months, working together with NHS organisations and partners, we have achieved a significant amount of progress and success.

Last December I reported that we had exceeded 1 million users accessing the portal. A year on, there are now over 1.36million employees accessing the portal – a great reflection on how NHS employees have embraced the new functionality. Furthermore, at the end of November, over 1 million employees have now opted out of receiving paper payslips, resulting in significant cost savings for the NHS.  The pace of growth across many other areas of functionality has also continued throughout the year, in particular ESR’s Learning Management functionality (OLM), Appraisal functionality and Employee Self Service. 

In April we took part in the National Streamlining week - which was run in partnership with NHS Employers and NHS Improvement.  The week was dedicated to showcasing how NHS organisations, regions and STPs are embracing Streamlining to reduce the time to hire new employees to improve the experience of those staff moving between employers, and provide tools and resources designed to help those that were embarking upon Streamlining.  All of the ESR resources can be accessed via Discover your ESR.

During the year we have continued to play a key role in the national Doctors in Training project.  Led by NHS England / Improvement, in partnership with other organisations, both of these projects now fall into the ‘Enabling Staff Movement’ programme. This programme aims to improve the induction and rotation process for all staff — starting with doctors in training. Through implementation of this programme, trusts will be supported to further improve the doctors’ experience when  on rotation between NHS organisations - with on-boarding and induction information only being repeated when necessary. 

This is just one example of how the NHS BSA ESR Team is working collaboratively on the national stage, ensuring that the ESR solution continues to enable efficiency and productivity benefits and meet the workforce information needs for local, regional and national NHS organisations.  Within this publication, there are further examples of how ESR has been developed to meet both national and local (user-led) requirements - consistent with previous years, as we look forward to 2020, ESR will continue to align to Workforce policy so as to support the NHS in delivery of the objectives, whilst meeting user needs.

You may recall in last years’ update I advised that the ESR programme had joined the NHS Business Services Authority in April 2018 – being part of an NHS Workforce Services Directorate along with NHS Jobs, NHS Pensions and an HR Shared Services function. 

Gordon Coyne, NHSBSA Director of Workforce Services comments:

During the course of 2020, it is our corporate ambition to continue to optimise how these key services work together for the benefit of the NHS and the emerging landscape.  We aim to provide a service to our customers that maximises benefit from use of NHS BSA Workforce Solutions in order to support effective recruitment, retention and workforce planning in the NHS. A number of exciting developments are being progressed that will further support this objective – including but not limited to a new NHS Jobs service being introduced in 2020, a MyNHS Pension self-service portal being introduced to further highlight the benefits and options of being within the NHS pension scheme, expansion of the HR shared services function to offer additional value add services across the NHS as well as ongoing developments to the ESR solution. Ultimately, all of our Workforce Services offerings will be aligned to both user needs and emerging policy – to this end, we will continue to work collaboratively with all organisations across NHS and Strategic Arm’s Length Bodies to maximise service impact.

As we approach the end of 2019, it also means that the final year software release (Release 44) is scheduled.  As with previous releases, Release 44 is significant as it includes a major Oracle release. Additionally, R44 includes a Portal upgrade to Liferay7 technology - whilst the upgrade itself will not change how the Portal is used, there will be improvements to how Portal content is managed, making it easier for administrators. The upgrade to Liferay7 will also future proof the ESR solution and enable us to continue to enhance the capability and the experience of users going forward.

Thanks and Best Wishes…

Finally, I hope that you find this December edition of ESR News interesting and on behalf of the ESR Programme and the NHS BSA, may I express our thanks for all of your support throughout 2019, wish you a Merry Christmas and offer Best Wishes for 2020.

ESR Developments continue to enhance the user experience

As we start to look towards the final main release of 2019, Release 44, it is worth looking back on what has already been a busy year with a number of significant developments made to ESR.  

38 different changes have been released since March 2019 and some of the highlights this year include:

• Ensuring the Appraisal and Review functionality within Self Service supports the new NHS Terms and Conditions of Service on Pay Progression,
• Enabling Applicants to access their own dedicated ESR Portal dashboard to help them in their on-boarding journey,
• Improvements to the usability and information provided on the My ESR Dashboard, with updated portlet functionality, including booking Annual Leave directly on the portal and updating the compliance portlet to give much great usability,
• Bringing changes to support the streamlining and enabling staff movement agenda, including the ability for employees to have competency updates reflected across multiple employers.

Details of these can be found in the Guide to Enhancement and Changes which accompany each release; these can be found on ESR KBASE. 

Release 44

Looking forward, December is another significant release for ESR with a large number of enhancements from our user community as well as changes supporting national initiatives.  In addition we will be completing the regular upgrade to the Oracle software with the implementation of the annual roll-up patch, which not only includes fixes but also the opportunity to capitalise on the latest Oracle functional enhancements.  Release 44 also includes an upgrade to the latest software behind the ESR portal. 

Supporting National Programmes – including:

Increasing the use of Job Planning across different staff groups -  Release 44 includes support for areas on NHS England and Improvement’ agenda with the introduction of new job plan recording for additional clinical staff.

Supporting streamlining and enabling staff movement programmes -  improved reporting is introduced on the tracking of Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) to help better management of the IAT process. 

Introduction of a new portlet allowing applicants moving around the NHS to have their bank details move with them from the current or last employer, which they can then confirm - removing the need for any manual input.

New My ESR Portlets

We are also introducing two new portlets to the My ESR Dashboard.  Based on the success of the Equality and Diversity portlet available for Applicants, this will be made available for Employees.  Giving quick and simple access to manage key diversity data such as Religious Belief, Sexual Orientation and Ethnic Origin the portlet is aimed at helping Organisations improve their data quality and reporting capability on diversity measures. 

A new “My Employment” portlet will also be introduced which will allow Employees to quickly see a consolidated data set relating to their service within the NHS, data on their assignment information in their current employers and a number of different data items currently dispersed on differing Self Service pages.  This portlet is designed to give the employee much greater understanding on the details held on ESR and help manage data quality by enabling the identification of any anomalies they may wish to query and have rectified.

 

Example layout for the My Employment Portlet:

Process Improvements

The importance of our engagement with ESR users is reflected in the changes included in Release 44, based on their feedback and requests aimed at improving usability and efficiency for both Self Service and core ESR users. The changes that have derived from users in Release 44 are detailed below:

Future changes to Equality Data ... ... ... ...

ESR enables the recording and reporting of data to help organisations demonstrate compliance with equality legislation.

It also assists in comparing the experiences of staff in the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) and Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WDES), and in determining action where necessary.

Current position

Where data items and values exist within the NHS National Workforce Dataset (NWD) they will be reflected in ESR. If a data item is not currently within the NWD then the values used in ESR will have been determined through consultation with user groups and appropriate stakeholders.

The data items and values currently available in ESR for some of the protected characteristics do not entirely satisfy all users and we have received a number of requests to add, remove or change them.

Are there plans to change the Equality and Diversity details recorded in ESR?

NHS England/Improvement (NHS E/I) are currently leading on a review of all protected characteristics which could result in a Unified Information Standard for Protected Characteristics (UISPC) or a number of separate information standards. This review covers data sets used across the NHS in relation to both the workforce and to patients. It is anticipated that the recommendations, if accepted, will be incorporated into the National Workforce Dataset at which point we will ensure they are reflected within ESR.

Will changes be made to ESR ahead of the wider review?

Although it would be possible to implement changes to the values in ESR independently of NHS E/I’s review to satisfy user requests, there is a high risk that any such changes would be rendered obsolete when that review is complete. So at present there are no plans for ESR to implement changes ahead of the published review outcomes.

Next steps

Once agreed, any changes to the data items or values will be incorporated into the National Workforce Data Set and ESR will be updated to comply with them.

In order to minimise delay NHS Digital have indicated that they may allow systems such as ESR to implement the required changes whilst the process to formally publish a revised National Workforce Dataset is underway. This approach was recently taken with the introduction of the Sexual Orientation Monitoring Standard.

NHS Digital will publish formal announcements regarding changes to the data sets on their website.  Users of ESR will be advised of changes and implementation dates through the usual channels including Release Notices and User Group meetings.

Introducing the new ESR Implementation Advisors

During the summer, we began to establish a new team of Implementation Advisors.

This role is designed to enable us to provide additional hands on project management and implementation support to NHS organisations that have committed to roll-out further ESR functionality.  The team have a wealth of ESR knowledge and experience and are already helping our regional teams to support a range of implementation projects.

We are delighted to introduce the first four new ESR Implementation Advisors who have joined the NHS ESR team in recent weeks; 

Graz Leonowicz – Midlands and East Team 

Graz joined the team in October having previously worked for Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.  Graz is currently working with Queen Elizabeth Hospital King's Lynn NHS Foundation Trust on their OLM rollout, and assisting Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust with their plan to implement Manager Self Service.

 

Bronwyn Driver  - North of England Team

Bronwyn previously worked across the North West supporting organisations to implement improved recruitment processes as part of the North West Streamlining Team, before joining the North ESR regional Team in September 2019.  

Bronwyn is currently working with North Lincolnshire and Goole (NLAG) who are migrating their course booking system into ESR as part of a wider Self Service project, which involves working with the NLAG  training administrators on site two days a week helping them to set up the 500 courses and associated offerings and classes and setting up OLM Data Groups to enable course facilitators to manage their own classes.

Nelson Boto – South of England Team

Nelson is currently working with the Isle of Wight Trust on their OLM & MSS implementation, Sussex Partnership with their implementation of Supervisor Self Service Limited Access and OLM, Great Ormond Street  Hospital who are progressing with their implementation of OLM, and a number of other projects scheduled for the early part of 2020 involving OLM, BI and Appraisal.

 

Jessica Brooks – North of England Team

Currently assisting Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust with the formation of a new catalogue of Mandatory Training courses, including the application of competency requirements, and will also be assisting North East Lincolnshire CCG with a similar project soon.

 

The team of eight, when fully recruited will provide support covering all the regions (South, Midlands and East, London and the North of England).

The expertise of the Implementation Advisors in their specific regions is available to organisations who commit to ESR implementation projects as part of their Annual ESR Assessment.  If your organisation hasn’t scheduled their 2019/20 Assessment yet, please contact your NHS ESR Regional Account Manager

Data Quality in ESR

Poor data quality can impact upon every aspect of the workforce from vacancy management to leaver analyses, from employee details to aggregate staff reports, from pay to pension.

Data from ESR enables analysis and monitoring across a wide range of policies and activities including: workforce information and planning, pay and reward, commissioning, statistics for FOI and PQs, diversity and inclusion, regulation, etc...

As highlighted in the recent Data Quality Webinars, ESR provides a variety of data quality resources to assist organisations in monitoring and improving their data.

A couple of examples are given below:

ESR NHS Data Quality Dashboard

The Data Quality Dashboard was initially designed to replicate the monthly WoVEn reports produced by NHS Digital. However, since its introduction a number of additional validations have been added to enable organisations to monitor many aspects of their data from missing email addresses to incorrect Registration details.

The Dashboard provides a high level Summary to show the number of errors for each validation and also has tabs to show the detail of the errors.

Organisations should, where possible, try to monitor this report frequently to address any errors as and when they occur, rather than waiting for the monthly WoVEn process to highlight issues.

Where a significant number of errors reoccur for the same validation, organisations should consider if a change is required to the local process linked to the validation (e.g. a high number of missing email addresses for new starters each month).

If you have any suggestions for additional Data Quality Validations that you think should be added to the national Dashboard then please raise an SR via the ESR Service Desk.

Workforce Information Verifier Dashboard

The Workforce Information Verifier Dashboard has been developed to help identify possible discrepancies between Occupation Code, Staff Group/Job Role and Pay Band that may exist within Assignments and their related Positions held in the ESR.

The tool was initially created in 2013 in partnership with NHS Digital to assist organisations in improving their data quality.  It has since been replicated in BI meaning that it can be run as and when required to see the ‘latest picture’.  The formulas within the analysis are updated after each National Workforce Dataset (NWD) release to reflect any changes, as well as any other ad-hoc changes which may be required as a result of trust feedback.

Any changes to the Verifier tool need to be considered by the national Workforce Information Review Group (WIRG) before we can implement into ESR BI.  Queries or requests for change should be sent to enquiries@nhsdigital.nhs.uk

 

NMC, GMC, HCPC & UID Reports

As well as the DQ reports available through ESRBI, we also send monthly reports to designated contacts at each organisation. These are produced by our Data Analysis Team and assist with Registration monitoring in ESR as well as Unique ID Monitoring.

Other Data Quality resources

• NHS Recruitment Dashboard (Vacancy monitoring)
• NHS Pensions Dashboard

Further information on all reports can be found in the HR Best Practice Guide on KBase here.

There are some organisations that don’t have a designated contact and therefore are not receiving these reports.

Please contact esr.datateam@nhs.net if you would like to update your organisations contact(s).

As a result of the resources made available, improved local processes, the roll-out of the ESR Portal enabling employees to ‘own their own data’ through Self Service and the launch of the Workforce Equality Standards for Race & Disability we have seen a significant improvement in Data Quality, particularly in relation to protected characteristics - some of which have been historically poorly populated. However, further work is required to continue the progress.

Did you know?

Following the recent Data Quality webinars we’ve produced a fact sheet based on the questions we received during the webinars which can be found here.