NHS invests £300m to cut HR and payroll duplication
- Posted:
- 10:36 21 Jun 2001
- Topics:
- Databases
A consortium, headed by McKesson HBOC, and including Oracle, PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, is the preferred supplier for the system, Oracle HRMS. The 10 year contract is due to be signed in September, with implementation scheduled for April 2002.
Philip Hewitson, chief executive of NHS Shared Services, said, "This provides us with a common system for staff recruitment and management." The system will integrate HR and payroll and eventually include electronic self-service and remote access, he said.
The NHS uses more than 30 different systems for its 1.2 million staff in England and Wales. The Government hopes to have the integrated system in place by mid-2004, despite a three-month delay earlier this year.
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The deal is part of the Shared Services Initiative launched in October 1999 to make better use of NHS resources. Hewitson said, "The NHS recruits 275,000 staff a year in England and Wales, about 200,000 of whom already work in the NHS." The system will transfer their details and let managers get on with their jobs, he said. Presently, many staff details are being re-keyed.
Industry experts have welcomed the move, but Murray Bywater, managing director of IT healthcare specialist Silicon Bridge Research, said, "In theory the NHS can achieve great economies of scale with a centralised HR and payroll system but it will be very complex to implement because they have a lot of people working in diverse environments."
The system's success depends on the service's ability to enforce standard HR business processes, he said.
But NHS managers, are concerned that the system will reduce local control.
A spokesman for the NHS Confederation said, "Unhappy experiences of large, centralised IT projects show they can be expensive, unresponsive and inflexible." But health service officials deny suggestions that the new system is designed to take control away from local managers. Hewitson said, "It is a system for local management and it will be managed locally."
IT project problems have dogged the NHS. In the early 1990s a centralised approach to rushed IT delivery hit the Hospital Information Support Systems initiative, losing up to £103m and prompting criticism from the Commons Public Accounts Committee.
System proposals
- New NHS HR and payroll system announced in 10-year deal, worth up to £300m
- Consortium headed by McKesson HBOC with Oracle, IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers named as preferred supplier
Guest editor's opinion
- Creating shared service centres is a tried and tested solution to eliminating data and systems duplication; and we all want efficient "joined-up" government IT systems
- Such a long-term investment in database technology should be maximised by creating a centre of excellence, so that skills and knowledge gained over the life of this project is leveraged by other government departments. Local authorities, for example, could learn from this project
James Rogers
james.rogers@rbi.co.uk
