Dear Bolton NHS Foundation Trust,

Please could you provide the following information:

How many joiners, movers, and leavers do you process per year?

How many staff/whole time equivalents manage this process?

Do you have an automated system to manage ESR?

Do you use a single sign on solution across the organisation to manage the accounts?
If so, which solution do you have?

How many people are in your organisation's data quality team?

Yours faithfully,

Clive Townsend

Dear Information Governance Department,
Thank you for reviewing my questions and reaching out for clarification.
My responses have unfortunately led to the removal of your textual presentation of the columns and rows.

"How many joiners, movers, and leavers do you process per year?
What year?"
If you have the figures for 01JAN19-31JAN19, accepting we've only just passed the new year, that would be great.
If easier to access and provide, I would be happy with the '18'19 financial year figures.
If either of these time periods are subject to unusual fluctuations such as caused by mergers or separation of services, could you provide the information for a year period before the event took place.

"How many staff/whole time equivalents manage this process?
We can state how many people/WTE work in department but I cannot state how much WTE is used just for
joiners/movers/leavers"
Thank you for explaining the challenge.
I would like to understand how many people are involved with creating staff the staff records across ESR and all relevant local systems. This could include the transcription of information from the ESR into any relevant HR systems or spreadsheets, and the dissemination and subsequent use of the information in the relevant departmental systems.
From your response it would seem to be even harder to gain a representative figure of effort expended.
If it's possible to confirm number of people employed by HR/the team who manage the employment staff records, and the number of people who are responsible for managing IT systems, I will look to use this in conjunction with the joiners, movers and leavers totals to make a calculated assumption as to the WTE equivalent.

"Do you have an automated system to manage ESR?
What does this mean? "
The ESR is often used as a stand-alone system and not used to help with the creation of the staff records within systems without human involvement. I am looking to ascertain whether the process of managing staff records from ESR into local systems is solely conducted by people within, or working for, your organisation, or whether any or all of the steps required are processed by batch, macro, or other automated approach which reduces or mitigates any human interaction.

"Do you use a single sign on solution across the organisation to manage the accounts?"
If so, which solution do you have?"

The accounts are any where the staff member exists as an entry in a pick list in a system, or has been allocated a user account for any system.
By "Single sign on" solution I seek to understand whether your Trust use any technology that allows any staff member to log into a computer using an appropriate security method, and are then able to access all task related applications (i.e. PAS, RIS, LIMS, etc) without needing to manually enter additional usernames and passwords.
The technology by which any of this may be achieved differs quite dramatically, hence the request using high-level terminology. You may have an active directory which allows direct access to emails or network drives and this in turn may have been extended to automatically log a user on to a clinical application. Alternatively, you may have a dedicated solution such as Microsoft's Vergence or Imprivata OneSign in use.
The reason for the question, which may help your colleagues offer a better response, is that I am looking to understand whether your organisation has processes and technologies to reduce the amount of duplicate effort required to create user accounts in systems across your organisations with the starting point being ESR.

"How many people are in your organisation's data quality team?
Data quality for what? Do you mean data|quality within the Business Intelligence team? Or data quality for HR. "

I am looking for confirmation of the number of people, or FTE values, who are employed to review the quality of the data across your systems. If easier to quantify, I am happy to focus on the team who would be validating information used to report and gain, or give, payment for patient activity conducted at your organisation.

I hope my clarifications are useful.

Yours sincerely,

Clive Townsend