Part of A Guide to the Staff Group, Job Role and Area of Work classifications used in ESR

Use of Information

Staff Group, Job Role and Area of Work classifications can be used locally for workforce planning and other information analysis within Trusts, and to support any regional comparisons. The data is also accessed and used regionally and nationally for workforce analysis and planning via the ESR Data Warehouse (DW).

The ESR DW provides a mechanism for national and other supra-Trust level reporting. It is maintained in a separate database and is populated by monthly extracts from ESR. It is used by a number of regional and national bodies such as NHS England, Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership.

The specific role or team responsible for creating and maintaining Positions in ESR will vary between different organisations, for example this role often falls to the Human Resources team but can also be performed by users in Finance or Payroll if allocated the appropriate User Responsibility Profile (URP). It is therefore very important that teams work together to ensure that data is entered correctly so that the right information can be extracted from the system.

Data will also be used locally within organisations by a range of people in addition to those mentioned above, such as in Training and Development, Workforce Information and Planning and Equality and Diversity. The accuracy of data entered onto ESR will therefore impact on a number of issues at local level and beyond.

NHS England (former NHS Digital) publish data on the NHS workforce, providing information on a wide range of Staff Groups across the NHS. This includes information collected via the ESR DW.

ARTICLE

Workforce data hub

Around 1.4 million people make up the NHS workforce in England, all contributing towards its overall effectiveness. Staffing is the single largest cost within the health system, so efforts to improve quality and reduce costs are often dependent on workforce data.

Data quality

NHS England and the ESR Central Team have created a joint reporting process known as the Workforce Validation Engine (WoVEn) to measure and feed back to organisations on the data quality of certain fields within ESR. The aim is to highlight possible areas for improvement in terms of completeness and accuracy of key fields in ESR, including Staff Group and Area of Work. Organisations can then use this information to address missing or invalid values and to monitor improvements in their overall data quality. The specific validation tests were determined through consultation with the service and are managed by the ESR Management Reporting National Special Interest Group.

For further information on the WoVEn reports, the validations or the process involved, please contact NHS England.

Other validation tools are available within ESR such as the Occupation Code and Job Role verifier tool; the ESR Data Quality Dashboard and the ESR Workforce Information Verifier Dashboard.

Area of Work, although not mandatory, is a key field for external reporting purposes as it provides the only available generic field for comprehensive comparison of the nature of the function in which employees work within an organisation.

The organisational structures for example directorates, departments etc.) used locally for reporting are not always comparable across organisations and are therefore not made available via the ESR Data Warehouse. They cannot therefore be reliably reported on regionally or nationally. It is therefore important that the Area of Work field is completed for accurate reporting at supra-trust level as well as internally.

In ESR users choose the appropriate Area of Work from a list of values (Tertiary Area of Work). In the Data Warehouse the higher-level groupings of Secondary and Primary Area of Work are populated via a look-up from the Tertiary level, and all three levels are available to Data Warehouse users for analysis at regional and national level. A full list of these values is available as an appendix.

Last edited: 4 July 2024 3:51 pm

Use of Information

Data quality

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