NHS England is aiming to use data from digital staff passports to better understand the movements of its employees between buildings and organisations.
Along with NHSX it has begun to look for a research partner to lead analysis and provide further evidence of staff movements.
This builds on its plan to develop a digital staff passport to enable staff to move freely between NHS buildings and organisations with minimal bureaucracy.
NHS England has identified a number of problems it wants to solve from the data, including quantifying staff movements, establishing how long it takes to process their movement between organisations, obtaining a better understanding of the legal mechanism and barriers to staff movements, and how the use of the passports will be regarded by staff.
Some discovery work has already been done focused on the movements of doctors in training. This has established that they can rotate up to 16 times over an average of 10 years, with an average of eight changes of NHS employer.
Each stage requires new pre-employment checks and mandatory training, which can be a source of frustration.
An interim Covid-19 digital staff passport has already been developed but the organisation wants a long term solution that will be able to carry a verified record of their clearance on a smartphone app. This would include name, date of birth, national insurance number, a photograph, professional registration details, basic details on employment checks, basic details of current employment and a confirmation of occupational health clearance.
Image from iStock, Omar Osman
