Providing staff information

All known staff, including agency and bank staff in all staff groups (GPs (including partners), nurses, direct patient care and admin or non-clinical) should be included.

Registrars (ST1/2/3/4) and junior doctors, doctors in training (foundation doctors) should not be recorded in NWRS as information on these staff is captured already on the Trainee Information System (TIS). Any other staff undertaking training whilst working at a GP practice or PCN should be recorded in NWRS, including medical students, return to practice programme GPs, international induction programme GPs, nursing students and other trainees/students.

If an individual has progressed in their training but is still employed at the organisation (for example now as a salaried GP), their Staff Role field should be updated accordingly. Any records for trainees who no longer work at the organisation should be marked as a leaver, so their record no longer appears as active.

PCN staff should be entered separately under the PCN module NWRS modules (general practice, PCN and PCN contracted services) are not linked. All staff the PCN receives funding for should be recorded in the PCN module of NWRS, even if the individual’s employer is not the PCN. This includes the clinical director and any staff funded through the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS).

All staff funded by the PCN should be recorded in NWRS PCN collection, even if the individual’s employer is not the PCN. This includes, but is not limited to, the clinical Director(s) and any staff funded through the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS). All non-ARRS roles funded through the PCN must also be included. As a minimum we would expect to see a minimum of one cinical Director (any type) and at least one member of their clinical team – you may be contacted by NHS England’s regional, data quality, or statistics teams if this isn’t the case and asked to provide more records.

The national primary care multi-disciplinary workforce team is working with NHS England regional workforce colleagues to ensure that the NWRS more accurately reflects the recruitment that has taken place and can be evidenced through the ARRS Claims Portal. Regional leads may contact you to discuss your overall workforce and claims figures, so please ensure all your ARRS roles are recorded in NWRS. 

For example clinical directors

How to do this depends on the specific roles and the funding:

If the person performs a separate distinct role at the practice and PCN (for example GP partner at the practice and clinical director at the PCN) then there should be a record for the practice and another for the role at the PCN (as the clinical director role is PCN funded, and the GP Partner one is not). The relevant FTE should be recorded in each case.

If a role is 100% funded by the PCN, the person should be recorded under the PCN even if they are based at the practice or their payroll is handled by the practice. For example, a dietician working at a practice for whom 100% of the allowed Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) rate is claimed.

If a role is jointly funded by the PCN and the practice, there should be a record for that role in both the PCN and practice modules with the FTE reflecting the contracted (i.e., funded) hours in each case. For example, a clinical pharmacist may work at a practice where they are partly funded by the ARRS and partly by the practice

for example an NHS trust

These should be recorded as you would with directly employed staff. Any funded through the PCN should be recorded by the PCN. 

for example those only available on the PCN module 

For further information see the role list in the Appendix. 

If you receive any PCN funding for these roles through ARRS reimbursement claims or another route through the PCN, they should be recorded against the PCN, regardless of which organisation handles payroll. If these roles are part of a contracted service and it is not known who will be working the hours each week, then they should be recorded in the PCN contracted services module rather than creating separate records in the PCN module for this. If the same individual/s fulfil/s the role/s each week then they should be recorded as PCN staff.

Care coordinator is a PCN specific role, but pharmacist may be funded via the PCN or the practice (if it is the practice, then the role should be recorded in the GP practice module).

If the roles are part-funded, please see the response to the question recording GP practice staff that now work at PCN level. Usually, the member of staff will need to have more than one record in NWRS.

Even though these roles are submitted to the ARRS Claims Portal, all ARRS roles should be recorded on NWRS before claims are made via the ARRS Portal. Currently, there are no resources or funding to merge ARRS and NWRS systems. Also, in talking to the ARRS teams we are aware that there are differences in how data providers fill out the two returns (and we issue a publication around this).

The National Primary Care Multi-Disciplinary Workforce team is working with NHS England regional workforce colleagues to ensure that the NWRS more accurately reflects the recruitment that has taken place and can be evidenced through the ARRS Claims Portal.

Regional leads may contact you in due course to discuss your overall workforce and claims figures, so please ensure all your ARRS roles are recorded in NWRS.

We are currently reviewing the roles in NWRS against new requirements and are working in partnership with other NHSE teams to add required roles. We'll announce any changes in the extraction reminder and on the website but don't have a firm date for any at the moment as roles need to go into the Workforce Data Standard before they can be added to any data collection.

All PCN staff you receive funding for via the PCN should be recorded by the PCN, rather than the GP practice. You may need to liaise with the PCN NWRS to provide details.

Staff should be recorded with the appropriate FTE and job role under each GP practice they work in. If a member of staff is funded by a PCN they should be recorded by the PCN.

These roles should be moved to the PCN module. Unfortunately, we don’t have system functionality to do this yet but there is a work around in place. This is detailed on the NWRS support page under “Moving records from GP practices to PCNs

If the person is known (name, etc.), they should be entered as a PCN staff record (and not as a contracted service). Please provide as much information as possible, and speak to the staff member when possible to obtain the missing information. The National Insurance number field is not currently mandatory so you will be able to submit these records.

If you are buying in a service and don't know who will be filling the role on a week-by-week basis, then details need to be recorded in the PCN contracted services part of NWRS.

Average weekly hours and contracted working hours (per week) are specific only to work within your practice or PCN. If a staff member works in other settings outside the practice (for example a day in a hospital), these hours should not be included in your NWRS data. It is only mandatory to complete one of these fields, so for most contract types, we would recommend completing the Contracted Working Hours field. For any zero-hours contract types, you will need to complete the average weekly hours field; guidance is provided in the how to complete the average hours worked field. 

Due to improvements in the validation applying to these fields, you may find that the option to amend or record hours has disappeared when editing an existing record. To address this, reselect Contract Type for your member of staff from the dropdown at the top of the page, and it should appear. If it does not, please select a different Contract Type and then reselect the desired value, which will reinstate the hours fields.

Calculate the actual hours worked (including overtime) during the most recent month and divide by the number of weeks in the month (including decimals). The “Average Hours Worked” field needs to be updated each month if it changes.

For a 31-day month, the number of weeks is 4.43; for a 30-day month this is 4,29; for a 29-day month it is 4.14 and for a 28-day month it is 4.

• if a person works 160 hours in August (31-day month), then their weekly average hours would be (160/4.43) = 36.12 hours
• alternatively, you can simplify the calculation by using a 4-week basis for the month and adjusting on a weekly basis for hours missed, for example, if 2 days are missed and the employee works a 35-hour week (7 hours per day) then their average working hours per week would be (35+35+21+35)/4 = 31.5
• if a person always works 38 hours per week, then their normal average hours per week would be 38 hours per week. However, this should be updated to reflect any leave taken (days not worked)
• If a person is sick 2 days in the month, then the missed hours for the 2 days need to be subtracted from the normal hours worked in the month to give the actual hours worked that month, before calculating the weekly average
• If a person is on maternity or long-term sickness absence, 0 average hours should be entered until they returned to work

In the contract type dropdown, select “Zero hours contract”, and enter 0 in the “Weekly contracted hours” field. The “Average weekly working hours” field should be completed using the average weekly hours worked over the most recent month.

Sessions must not be entered instead of hours due to their being no standard definition of a session (see above); we therefore require the number of hours to be entered so we can calculate accurate statistics.

Recording salaried GPs who do locum sessions  

If a salaried GP also does locum sessions at the practice you will need to create a second (locum) record for the individual. 

The correct format for National Insurance Number is AB123456C, but there are rules regarding which letters can be used. For example:

• The final letter is always A, B, C or D.
• The first letter cannot be D, F, I, Q, U or V.
• The second letter cannot be D, F, I, Q, U, V or O.
• The first two letters cannot be BG, GB, KN, NK, TN or ZZ.

More information is provided on the HMRC website.

If the system will not accept your NI number, please check with the staff member that you have been provided with the correct number. Whilst NI number is not a mandatory field currently, it may become so in the future as it is really important for producing our statistics as it enables us to remove duplicates and count the staff who work in multiple settings. Our workforce statistics include only aggregate counts and we do not publish any personal identifiers for staff, including NI number.

1. From your staff table, click View on the record you need to mark as a leaver, then scroll down to the Contract section.

2. Click change against the “Are they still working here?” question and change the response from “Yes” to “No”. This will bring up 3 questions about when the person left, their reason for leaving, and what they did next.

3. Once you have answered these questions, click Save and Continue and then you will have the option to check your answers.

4. If these are correct, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click  Submit.

If someone has changed role within your organisation (for example, from a Receptionist to a Medical Secretary, or from a GP Partner/Provider to a Senior Partner, you will need to mark the record for the old role with a termination date and then enter a new record. However, if the person has changed contract type but remained in the same staff role (e.g., from zero hours to a permanent contract) then you can retain the record provided you update the contract type (and working hours, if applicable).

We are limited to the values available in our data standard (the National Workforce Dataset), but this has been raised with the Datasets team. For now, please select 'Unknown' for any other values or not stated. There isn’t a statement regarding this on the page, as we expect this to be addressed.