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University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
The establishment of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) in 2022 represented a unique opportunity for the new Sussex Health and Care Partnership.
One of the largest ICSs in the south of England, five of its seven NHS organisations leveraged this scale to co-create a shared payroll service, combining efficiency, consistency and service.
- ICS-wide payroll and pensions hub
- Unique mix of in-house and outsource
- Savings of c.29%
- Manages more than 61,000 payslips per month (avg. 25,500 monthly and 36,000 weekly)
- 99.8% accuracy
“Payroll accuracy is high and payroll timetables have always been met”
Clare Stafford, Director of Finance
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
The Challenge
With over 30,000 staff, moving onto a shared payroll service, at the height of the pandemic, was a daunting prospect.
With each of the five NHS organisations using different payroll models, and the largest (University Hospitals Sussex) having itself just been created from the merger of two predecessor NHS trusts, the payroll landscape across the ICS was complicated and inefficient.
Staff – many exhausted from dealing with the pandemic -were chasing historical pay and pension queries, as well as new ones caused by the plethora of changes in hours and pay caused by Covid. In turn, the payroll teams were overwhelmed, and morale was low.
Cost per payslip was higher than average, and the inefficiencies were compounded by a high number of manual payments and over-and under-payments.
The Solution
A new payroll and pensions hub come into operation on 1 October 2022. Initially serving University Hospitals Sussex NHSFT, the other four organisations gradually onboarded, culminating in Queen Victoria Hospital NHSFT in February 2023.
Neither a fully outsourced arrangement nor an entirely insourced one, the new hub is a hybrid one, designed to keep local jobs for local people whilst maximising efficiencies. It combines the security of an in-house service with the resilience, capacity and flexibility of an outsourced one.
Approximately 20 staff work on-site within UHS premises, and were TUPE transferred to NHS SBS. With an additional 10 staff at NHS SBS offices, the hub is able to flex resources and systems to manage the peaks and troughs that are an inevitable part of such a large ICS.
The service also draws on the digital expertise of NHS SBS, with integrations and automations including a customer service portal and management system allowing employees and managers to raise and track pay and pension queries 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; a mail manager filing repository that can extract attachments from emails and push into a workflow for payroll to process; and robotics to deal with high-volume, low complexity data input to minimise manual handling and allow increased time for processing and reducing errors.
These are combined with self-service support for end-users, in the form of a unique App, My SBS Pay, which gives staff access to information at their fingertips, whenever and wherever they are.
In total, the hub manages more than 61,000 payslips per month (25,500 monthly and 36,000 weekly) with an accuracy of over 99.8%.
Establishing the new hub gave many of the member trusts a chance to start with a clean sheet – clearing backlogs of enquiries, and ensuring consistency in their ways of working. As the hub is the first port of call for all pay and pension queries, common issues and themes are quickly picked up and can be addressed before they escalate.
The Result
The new payroll hub has released savings of c.29%, whilst simultaneously improving the quality of service.
Priority 1 (urgent) cases are typically resolved in less than half a day, with priority 2 cases taking less than two days. Many common enquiries are resolved by staff themselves through the helpful FAQs and knowledge articles hosted on the MySBSPay app and portal. Salary overpayments are processed and employees informed within 10 working days of being identified and consequently are recovered much more quickly.
Management information is provided to track service performance against Key Performance Indicators, such as the volume of underpayments, including payments made outside of payroll, overpayments raised and progress against recovery and NHS Pension forms completion. Root cause analysis to help reduce and track trends in late and inaccurate data is standard.
The hub has also helped to harmonise pay and pensions. A working group comprised of all ICS members plus NHS SBS reviews and discusses good practice, sharing experiences and mapping out a continuous improvement plan to ensure their employees get the best possible service. The group is governed by a Sussex Health and Care Payroll Board with senior stakeholder members from the ICS and NHS SBS.
“Onboarding took place whilst there was still a backlog of historic issues that were quickly, and satisfactorily resolved by the new team in a short period of time”
Clare Stafford, Director of Finance
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
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