THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE
TRACKS THE U.K.’S BIGGEST
WORKFORCE WITH AN
INTEGRATED SYSTEM.
n the rapidly changing marketplace of health-
care, short-term treatments for ailing IT systems
are seldom effective. At the National Health
Service (NHS) of England and Wales, the cure
for a set of employee-related business challenges
was a seven-year transformation of payroll and
human resource (HR) management. NHS employs
about 1. 3 million people, accounting for 7 percent
of the United Kingdom’s working population. It’s the
largest employer in Europe, but it’s also one of the
most decentralized.
The NHS is organized into 600 healthcare trusts,
which function as subsidiaries representing a
single hospital, a group of hospitals, or a primary
care facility. Each trust is a legal, autonomous
employer with its own board of directors—and,
historically, its own local or regional system for
gathering and managing employee records. Until
recently, 38 HR systems and 29 payroll systems
operated under the umbrella of the NHS. With the
development of Electronic Staff Record (ESR) in
2001, the NHS began replacing those aging and
disparate systems with a single system built
A He
