bso service offering 2012/13 · web viewthe purpose of this document is to articulate the bso’s...

BSO Service Offering 2016/17

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CONTENTS

Page

Executive Summary 3

Directorate: Operations – PALs 4

Directorate: Operations – FPS 14

Directorate: Operations – HSC Pension Service 16

Directorate: Operations – Counter Fraud and Probity Services

19

Directorate: Customer Care & Performance – ITS 26

Directorate: Customer Care & Performance – Office of Research and Ethics NI

44

Directorate: Customer Care & Performance – Customer Relations and Service Improvement

46

Directorate: Customer Care & Performance – Equality and Human Rights

48

Directorate of Legal Services 51

Directorate of Finance 54

Directorate: Finance - Internal Audit 56

Directorate of Human Resources and Corporate Services

58

HSC Leadership Centre 61

HSC Clinical Education Centre 63

BSTP - Shared Services 66

Annex 1 73

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Executive Summary

The purpose of this document is to articulate the BSO’s Service Offering for 2016/17.

The fundamental basis upon which this Offering has been constructed is a continued

focus on providing our HSC clients with a value for money, best in class service which is

underpinned by an improvement in overall efficiency of at least 3%.

The Service Offering is broken down by Directorate / Service Area and sets out in some

detail the various services offered, the levels of resources committed within each and

the measures planned to generate efficiency savings in 2016/17 by cash releasing

savings, increases in productivity and generation of additional income.

A summary of planned 2016/17 efficiencies by Directorate / Service Area is included at

Annex 1, but in overall terms BSO is committed to delivering a blended efficiency of

4.0% to its customers in its Service Offering for 2016/17. This is comprised of 3.2%

in the form of cash efficiencies and 0.8% in the form of weighted average productivity

improvements.

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Directorate: Operations, Procurement and Logistics Service

1. Overview of Service OfferingBSO Procurement and Logistics Service is the Centre of Procurement Expertise in respect of goods and services for Health and Social Care organisations in N.I. It offers procurement and logistics services to all HSC organisations in the form of sourcing of goods and services through competitive tender processes, tactical day to day ordering of goods and services not covered by contract through its operational procurement service and central warehousing and distribution of approximately 4000 stock lines to 46,000 customer locations. In addition it also offers non-core services to some individual organisations including community equipment services (warehousing, distribution and recycling), local stores management and electronic materials management scanning and put-away.

Total spend managed by BSO PaLS is approximately £650m (based on 2014/15 figures).

In an effort to support its clients BSO PaLS is targeting reducing budgets by 2.5%, in the context of the 2015/16 budget this translates to a figure of £290,000 on a budget of £11.6m. This reduction will be delivered based on cash releasing of 1.5% and productivity of 1% reflected as follows:

Cost Reduction (£)

1.5% 174,000

1% 116,000

Total 2.5% 288,500

BSO PaLS fees have not been reviewed since 2003/04 and have grown only by pay and prices since then with the exception of some recurrent funding provided by HSCB following completion of the CSR 2004/2007 projects to support the new areas of work delivered in those projects. Since 2003/04 there has been considerable and significant growth in BSO PaLS services both in terms of activity and the range of services offered. This growth has been absorbed within available resources it therefore follows that a financial position that reduces the funding available will have an impact on service delivery.

1.1 Pressures

In addition BSO PaLS faces a number of pressures in 2016/17 which will impact on resource requirements and service delivery throughout 2015/16 in particular:

Introduction in September 2015 of the new ETendersNI online tendering system has not been without its difficulties and a number of the efficiencies of the previous Bravo eSourcingNI portal have been lost. This system is a “free good” to CoPEs and it is a requirement of the public procurement policy that we utilise it.

The decision by DHSSPS to list HSC organisations as “Schedule 1 Bodies” within the new Public Contract Regulations 2015 which has the effect of

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reducing the threshold above which tenders must be conducted in accordance with the regulations has been further impacted by a reduction in those thresholds as a result of the strength of the £sterling against the Euro. This threshold is now £106k.

Embedding new service offerings on Service and Maintenance Contracts for HSC Trusts and the development of a new Social Care Procurement Service will stretch management resources further in giving oversight to an increased range of complex procurements and engaging with a new set of stakeholders as part of the management arrangements.

Agreement of revised SLA arrangements with NIFRS incorporating a more extensive service level agreement will place additional pressure on PaLS management resources in providing oversight of a range of above threshold contracts, regular engagement with a new set of stakeholders and whilst improving current service arrangements.

The issues above will have an immediate and ongoing impact and this is important within the context for the PaLS 2016/17 Service Offering to HSC customers.

2. StaffingOn average during the 2015/16 year BSO PaLS has had a funded staffing level of 327.17 WTEs with a staff in post of circa 301 WTEs. Vacant posts where possible were covered with either temporarily contracted or temporary agency staff; others are in the recruitment process. Within the procurement function it is not feasible to recruit short-term cover for specialist Sourcing posts from agencies therefore those posts remain vacant until recruited. These staffing resources include staff engaged in core and non-core services and staff funded directly by DHSSPS in Compliance, Social Care and Emergency Planning

At the Regional Procurement Board held in January 2016 it was agreed that PaLS would mainstream its “deep dive analysis” service. This is reflected in section 5.2.4 “Additional Services to be Funded”.

3. BudgetThe PaLS Department had an operating budget for 2015/16 of £11.6m*:

Pay £9.4mNon Pay £2.2m

Total £11.6m *excluding NIFRS and S&MT

4. Service GrowthService Growth must be considered in the context of the time elapsed since the last review of management fees which occurred in 2003/04. The table below shows growth over the intervening period and provides context for any cash releasing actions and their impacts.

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4.1 Logistics:

Fin Ye

ar 03/04

Fin Ye

ar 04/05

Fin Ye

ar 05/06

Fin Ye

ar 06/07

Fin Ye

ar 07/08

Fin Ye

ar 08/09

Fin Ye

ar09/1

0

Fin Ye

ar 10/11

Fin Ye

ar 11/12

Fin Ye

ar 12/13

Fin Ye

ar 13/14

Fin Ye

ar 14/15

Fin Ye

ar 15/16 (P

jtd)

1,000,000

1,100,000

1,200,000

1,300,000

1,400,000

1,500,000

1,600,000

1,192,936 1,221,153 1,247,520 1,280,443 1,320,752 1,340,156

1,391,562 1,375,722

1,480,259 1,499,152 1,427,035 1,458,162 1,474,261

Lines Activity Increase

LINES Picked

Lines

The activity position since 2003/04 has increased by 23.6% and by 6% since the establishment of BSO (marked by the vertical line).

4.2 Procurement - Sourcing

The sourcing function has seen significant sizeable increases in the level of spend managed through BSO PaLS contracts. In parallel the complexity of those contracts has increased impacting on the skill-mix of staff involved in their oversight, letting and management. Changes in regulations and audit requirements around monitoring contract spend and dealing with subsequent material changes to contracts have added further complications and workload at all levels within sourcing and across the BSO PaLS procurement management team.

NB: The area of the graph contained within the shaded box represents the work carried out during PaLS Recovery Programme.

The graph above shows not only growth in number of contracts awarded each year but also and most significantly growth in the number of invitations to tender issued, which is the term used to cover openly advertised procurements, reflecting the growing complexity in the work being undertaken. The over the

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period since BSO’s inception the number of Invitations to Tender (ITT) issued annually has increased by 110% and the number of contracts awarded by 47%.

4.3 Procurement – Operations

The activity carried out by the procurement operations teams has grown steadily since 2010/11 after introduction of the Unitas e-requisitioning system and then eProc in the FPL system this growth sits at 9%. The graph below shows the growth in operational procurement activity requiring manual intervention since 08/09 however since the introduction of the FPL systems, indicated by the vertical line, overall growth sits at 22.2% between 12/13 and 15/16.

2008-2009

2009-2010

2010-2011

2011-2012

2012-2013

2013-2014

2014-2015

2015-16

Pjtd

0

200000

400000

600000

800000

1000000

1200000

Total Number of Transactions (Ecatalogue and Manual)Number of manual lines processed

5. 2016-17 Service OfferingFor 2016-17 the service offering is to contain cash releasing reductions of 1.5% equivalent to £173.1k and further productivity equivalent to 1% giving an overall service offering equivalent to £290,000. In seeking to support our clients with this offering we are mindful that an adverse impact on service delivery is possible and PaLS will work through the year to minimise that impact.

The spread of the PaLS budget is as follows:

Logistics 55%

Procurement 39%

Other (Social Care / Compliance / Management)

6%

The following actions below are identified and accompanied by any associated actions required to support their delivery, an impact analysis and any reduced activity delivery.

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5.1 Logistics – Core Service

The logistics core service represents the purchase, storage, picking and delivery of goods to 43,000 locations across HSC. The warehouse throughput in 2015/16 is projected to be circa £44.5m supplied via a projected 1.49m1 picks.

Proposed Productivity Action: In the Logistics service offering for 2015/16 PaLS committed to delivering 1.42m picks the projection for 15/16 is showing that PaLS logistics team will deliver over 1.47m picks during 15/16 which is above the agreed target. For the service offering for 16/17 PaLS logistics team will increase activity from the 15/16 baseline by 30,000 picks to 1.45m picks giving a productivity increase of 2.1% on warehouse picking activity. Providing a productivity gain against 15/16’s agreed levels of activity of approximately 30,000 lines i.e. a cap on activity of 1.45m picks for 16/17 rather than 1.42m.

Offering:

15-16 offering

16-17 Offering

%age increase

Cash Equivalence

(£k)

Overall PaLS %age

increase

Picks 1,420,000 1,450,000 2.1% 133 1.15

Impact: A cap on activity will be introduced based on the projected level of each customer organisation in 2015/16 up to a collective maximum of 1.45m picks. Any activity above the cap will be charged at a per line rate based on marginal costs.

Associated impact 1: In the 15/16 Service Offering we identified a potential requirement to charge for emergency orders for warehouse goods. Whilst no charge was made during the 15/16 year we will retain the position that a charge will be made if necessary. The same charge identified in the 15/16 offering will apply with a rate of £125 during the working day and £205 outside working hours. This action will encourage customers to order on time and deter the use of emergency orders in the run up to public and bank holidays.

Associated impact 2: In line with the service offering 15/16 PaLS will continue to accept no liability for minor discrepancies between goods picked and goods delivered.

It is anticipated that these steps may have a negative impact on customer perceptions of BSO PaLS customer service.

Proposed Cash Releasing Action:

In order to deliver cash releasing on PaLS costs of 1.5% the Logistics function will deliver cash releasing of £80,000. This will be achieved through a reduction in rates budgets and fuel oil budgets, please note this latter budget will be affected by any significant shift in the global oil price.

Cash Release Budget Area £k

1 Based on a straight extrapolation of activity.

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Rates / Fuels 80

5.1.1 Logistics Summary Table

Proposed Action Action Impact

Cash Release /

(£k)

% of Logistics Budget

Cash Releasing:Reduction in Rates and Fuel Oils budgets £80k 80 1.3Productivity (no additional charge):Increase in agreed picking volumes (1.42m to 1.47m)

30,000 picks

- 2.1

Total 80 3.4

This provides a blended service offering equivalent to 3.4% on the logistics budget.

5.2 Procurement Services

Procurement services are delivered in two distinctly separate functions and for the purposes of this service offering any cash releasing savings are considered based upon the impacts on those services. The total budget for Procurement is approximately £4.6m and has a cash release target of £94k or 2%.

5.2.1 Procurement Sourcing:

This function undertakes competitive tendering processes in order to secure best value for money for approximately 90% of expenditure managed by BSO PaLS. The service ensures that processes are conducted in accordance with the Public Contracts Regulations and supports delivery of value for money. This is the key service associated with BSO PaLS accreditation as a Centre of Procurement Expertise. In conducting its business BSO PaLS supports its clients in maintaining proper controls over expenditure, compliance with procurement regulations and good governance.

Reduction in the resources available to sourcing activity within PaLS has a direct impact on the renewal of existing contracts, taking forward new contracts, the currency of the online catalogue, clearance of invoices and the number of STAs required.

During the 15/16 year it is projected that PaLS will initiate 258 tenders i.e. 258 competitions above £30k having anticipated delivery of 285 in the 15/16 Service Offering. There were however, difficulties in the recruitment of the service and maintenance contracts team and other recruitment challenges. BSO PaLS will again commit to delivery of 285 invitations to tender during 16/17.

Associated Action 1: In accordance with the targets within the DHSSPS Strategic Procurement Action Plan customers will agree to operate on the basis of “tender once” and act collaboratively with PaLS when approaching the market. Where a customer insists on a bespoke arrangement and refuses to collaborate with other HSC organisations or to avail of pre-existing framework agreements then PaLS may levy a charge. Fees will be based on the prevailing per diem rate contained within the PaLS Ad-Hoc Procurement Service Provider Framework.

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There will be no cash release or productivity gain from this area as it will seek to expand current contract coverage to increase the effectiveness of the FPL online catalogue and assure timely renewal and compliance for the range of contracts to be undertaken.

5.2.2 Procurement Operations:

This function undertakes the day to day tactical purchasing of items not covered by contracts awarded by BSO PaLS sourcing teams or the ordering of goods or services where items covered by contract are not included within the online catalogue e.g. services or one-off purchases of equipment which have been tendered. Staff working in Procurement Operations also act as a point of contact for customers at an operational level providing an advice and guidance service to those customers for whom they provide procurement services. In 2015/16 the projected number of non-catalogue transactions undertaken by Procurement Operations is 239541 which is an increase of 7.6% since 11/12 pre system implementation.

Currently PaLS are meeting SLA targets on a “global” basis however when reviewed on a PaLS site by site basis some sites are experiencing significant increases in activity in quarter 3 and quarter 4 of the financial year which is causing some to struggle to meet processing targets.

In order to deliver the cash releasing requirements for procurement PaLS will reduce the number of Whole Time Equivalents within operations by approximately 3 to 4. However in the current activity climate this will result in sustained and unacceptable delays in processing therefore this will require time to deliver and will be achieved by bringing sites to an individual common average which may require displacement and/or redeployment of staff. To achieve this a project will be required during 16/17 therefore it is proposed that for the 16/17 year the target of £94k will be met through internal management of budgets with a view to the WTEs being removed prior to 2017/18.

Cash Release Budget Area £k

Procurement Operations 94

5.2.3 Additional Services Within Current Fee Base

BSO PaLS has agreed the introduction of a new EProc service to provide support to requisitioners within organisations in order to increase their use of the online catalogue, reduce levels of non-catalogue activity and increase the level of goods and services being ordered through the Purchase Order Processing (POP) system to increase control and visibility of the goods and services being procured. The service is being introduced at no cost to BSO PaLS clients. The total cost of the service to be provided is £72k.

5.2.4 Additional Services to be funded – Deep Dive Analysis

It is recognised that the work carried out by PaLS on Deep Dive Analysis has identified savings opportunities for Trusts generally in excess of £350k with between 50% and 60% of that readily achievable. The Regional Procurement Board has agreed “Demand Management” as one of its key strategic initiatives for 16/17 to 18/19 with one of the strands being the mainstreaming of deep dive analysis into PaLS services. In line with the agreed initiatives PaLS proposes to

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offer a “Procurement Analysis Service”. This service will be delivered based on an agreed programme of work each year with each large organisation revisited on a regular basis to ensure continuous improvement is achieved. The service cost will be £57.3k per annum and it was agreed at the Regional Procurement Board that this cost would be met by HSC Organisations.

5.2.5 Procurement Summary Table

Proposed Action Action Impact

Cash Release /

(£k)

% of Procurement

BudgetCash Releasing:Reduction in resources within Procurement Operations

£94k 94 2.1

Productivity (no additional charge):Implementation of Eproc Support Service

Service Development

- 1.6

Total 94 3.7

This provides a blended service offering equivalent to 3.7% on the procurement budget

6. Additional Income Generation

In its service offering for 15/16 HSC accepted a charge for General Capital Expenditure of 0.5% of the value of the expenditure and that this charge would be levied on requests submitted to PaLS during quarter 4. This was proposed to encourage early ordering and help facilitate better co-ordination of capital expenditure whilst ensuring that goods can be procured following due process where possible. BSO PaLS has not imposed this charge during 15/16 but will keep this under review for 16/17.

7. Areas likely to be the subject of hard charging

The only area within PaLS subject to regular hard charging is Capital Projects. The non-recurrent income anticipated for this and associated projects’ is shown in the table:

Project Anticipated Non-Recurrent Income (£k)

Omagh Hospital 45Cancer Centre, Altnagelvin 64.25Ward Block, Ulster Hospital 25.6

Total £134.85

Following on from the changes to both Logistics and Procurement there may be requirements for hard charging as a result of the introduction of caps to activity. It is not possible to predict any charging necessary at this stage and charges will only be issued where they can be applied and where costs incurred cannot be absorbed within existing budgets.

8. Assurance to Customers

8.1 Governance:

Internal Audit – Internal auditors provided a satisfactory assurance on PaLS during 15/16

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PaLS retained both its ISO accreditation and its SHS Due Diligence Audit accreditation during 2015/16.

During the year 15/16 approximately 97.25% of contracts were tracking for renewal on time with no tenders stood down as a result of legal challenge.

8.2 Customer Survey 2015/16:

100% of respondents were satisfied with the overall service provided by PaLS with 84% rating it as “good” or “very good”

100% of those participating in Contract Adjudication Groups were satisfied with how they were managed with 91% indicating “good” or “very good”.

All respondents to our customer survey were satisfied with the courtesy of our staff.

8.3 Stakeholder Forums:

PaLS continue to support HSC Trust procurement Boards PaLS supports the work of the Regional Procurement Board PaLS are an active member of the Social Care Procurement Group. PaLS is an active member of the Regional Pharmaceutical Contracting

Executive Group PaLS represents HSC interests on the Northern Ireland Procurement

Practitioners Group.

8.4 Benchmarking:

PaLS take part in a range of benchmarking exercises. Outlined below:

BSO PaLS submitted data to the CIPFA Benchmarking club on Procurement based on the services provided to HSC. This data indicated that PaLS benchmarked favourably in all key areas.

9. Cost Pressures

There will be a number of additional cost pressures on BSO PaLS during 2016/17:

9.1 Logistics:

BSO PaLS has lost the potential to utilise any surpluses generated through variations between purchase price and fixed sales price as we now operate on a FIFO charging basis. This will be a pressure of approximately £250k on income.

Increased Electronic Materials Management activity associated with Phase 2 Royal Victoria Hospital – Critical Care Building. Bigger wards and additional bed capacity will lead to more EMM support. This was delayed from 15-16.

The Level of Non-stock receipting at PaLS R&D has increased with the introduction of eProc, this is reflected in the increases in non-stock lines being ordered.

Savings have been identified in fuel oils these are vulnerable to fluctuation and any significant change on the global price of fuels is likely to create an in-year pressure.

9.2 Procurement:

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The new Public Contracts Regulations 2015 will mean staff will require a greater level of support to ensure procurements are conducted correctly and it is anticipated that case law will emerge over the coming year that may impact PaLS practices.

Impact of “materiality” restrictions placed on EU contracts resulting in early renewal of contracts which leads to increased pressure on resources in sourcing teams.

The reduction in the EU threshold to £106k as a result of DHSSPS listing HSC organisations as Schedule 1 bodies will continue to stretch resources within the procurement sourcing teams.

The mainstreaming of social care and independent health sector will require significantly greater input from PaLS through a service expansion. This will stretch the management resources within PaLS.

The eTendering Tool used by NI Public Sector has been replaced during 2015/16. It is clear that the system is not as well developed as the predecessor which will impact on effective use of PaLS resource during 16/17.

The sustained increase in non-catalogue lines alongside a drive to reduce the use of FPM will potentially place pressure on operational resources during 16/17.

Procurement Guidance Notes have required CoPEs and their clients to undertake active collaboration in contracts with CPD. Subsequent delays to collaborative processes, unilateral decisions to decline to take forward agreed collaborations and contract termination will result in cost pressures on PaLS to act to fill the gaps resulting from these actions.

10. Summary

The table below shows the breakdown of cash releasing and productivity offered:

Source 2016/17 £k 2016/17 %Cash Releasing 174 1.5

Productivity - 1.8Additional income - -

Total 174 3.3

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Directorate: Operations, Family Practitioner Services

1. Overview of Service Offering

Family Practitioner Services’ main functions are to validate, calculate and authorise payments for General Medical Practitioners, General Dental Practitioners, Chemist Contractors and Community Ophthalmic Practitioners on behalf of HSCB, to provide professional advice and guidance to contractors, HSCB and the Department on payment-related matters, maintain the central register of patients registered with General Medical Practices, administer the call and re-call services for cervical cancer and bowel cancer screening and to provide information to HSCB and the Department of Health and Social Services and Public Safety.

The Family Practitioner Payment System (FPPS) Project was progressed during 2015-16 with the final payment system for the processing, calculation and payment of General Medical Service providers going live from May 2015. The primary aim of the new system was to reduce risks associated with dependence upon legacy IT hardware and software and to remove the need for secondary systems that had been developed to calculate payments that legacy systems were unable to calculate. The replacement payment calculation systems for Community Pharmacists and General Dental Practitioners went live during 2014-15. Although the primary aim for the replacement system project was to reduce risks related to the circa. £800m of payments, there will be some opportunity for savings related to efficiencies and these will be made in two phases.

Phase 1 savings in relation to increased efficiency will be achieved from March 2016 going forward. The realisation of Phase 2 savings will be dependent upon independent contractors’ use of the portal. As contractors cannot be compelled to use it, FPS will work with contractors’ representative bodies to gain their support for its use. We will also be relying on HSCB to join our efforts to persuade contractors to do so. Assuming full take-up of the portal Phase 2 savings could be achieved from March 2017 forward.

2. Staffing

There are 130 staff in FPS, working across Payment, Information and Registration services.

3. Budget

FPS has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £5.3m.


Total £5.3m

4. 2016/17 Offering

4.1 Cash releasing savings

Following the introduction of the FPPS replacement systems and the roll out of the portal as part of Phase 2, FPS will identify where savings can be achieved

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as a result of new systems. As part of this process FPS will also identify where it has been necessary to introduce new processes and any associated additional resources necessary as a result of the new systems and reducing payment related risks. During 2016-17 FPS will also work with HR to review the structure of FPS.

The FPPS replacement systems achieved savings during 2015/16, resulting in an in-year SLA adjustment to the commissioner, HSCB. The Service Offering 2015/16 reflected only c£40k of these savings and therefore the remaining savings, and any full year effect, are summarised below as the FPS Service Offering saving for 2016/17.

Full year effect savings pertain to Fujitsu system (offset by associated expenditure incurred by BSO in relation to the production of Medical Cards) £159k, other system savings £30k and the full year effect of Phase 1 staffing savings £159k. Factoring in the £40k savings already applied within the 2015/16 Service Offering, a cash releasing saving of £308k can be applied to the FPS SLA with HSCB, equating to 5%.

FPS senior management have, however, initiated discussions with the commissioner regarding additional resource requirements as a result of FPS identified requirements. The associated funding requirements will require agreement with HSCB.


Customer Survey 2015: 82.1% said they were happy with the overall service they received 74.0% said they are satisfied with the time taken to respond to queries; 81.5% said they are satisfied with the quality of advice received; 64.3% said they are satisfied with the time taken to complete the service.

Customer Forums: FPS participates in regular customer forums with the HSC Board and PHA; FPS engages with HSCB on a number of key projects including

o the Pharmaceutical Clinical Effectiveness Programme aimed at saving £21m of the prescribing budget in 2015-16

o the pilot of the new General Dental Services Contract for NIo monitoring the use of controlled drugs o estimate of the profit secured by community pharmacists from

purchasing drugs o Quarterly monitoring of the Service Level Agreement

6. Summary

Source 2015/16 £k 2014/15 %

Cash Releasing 308 5.0Productivity - -

Total 308 5.0

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Directorate: Operations, HSC Pension Service


The HSCPS provides a range of Pension Services to HSC client and directional bodies. These services range from transactional processing functions such as providing payroll services to approximately 35,000 pensioners, Scheme administration for approximately 78,000 current and deferred members to the provision of information for the production of a biennial valuation by GAD and the production of annual Statutory Accounts. HSCPS also has responsibility for all aspects of the management of the GP (and non GP) Providers Annual Certificates of Pensionable Profits and the Annual Declarations from Salaried GPs from the GP Payments Office of Family Practitioners Service (FPS).

HSCPS is also implementing the new CARE Scheme arrangements for Pension Reform. This entailed implementing a £1.3m upgrade to our current software system ALTAIR and a complete review and re-write of all our business processes, guides, forms, leaflets, etc. The system has been delivered on time and within budget, and we will complete Choice2 exercise in 2016/17. HSCPS is also delivering a challenging comprehensive communication strategy to all our stakeholders outlining these reforms and the impacts on Employers and Employees. The overall cost of implementation will be in excess of £2m which has already been secured from DFP through capital funding.

Operational performance is continually monitored and challenged and there is a specific SLA with DHSSPSNI with regular KPI reporting. HSCPS also have a number of stakeholder forums and a dedicated communication strategy.

2. Staffing

HSCPS is comprised of 35 staff in Awards, GP Unit, Payroll, Business Service Unit, Interface and Scheme Finance functions. All staff undergo a mandatory intensive pension specific training programme.

3. Budget

HSCPS has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £1.6m:


Total £1.6m

4. 2015/16 Offering

4.1 Productivity

SCHEME GROWTH 2013/14 2014/15 2015/16 1 Year Growth

%

2 Year Growth

%No. of Pensioners 31,846 32,850 33,698 2.6 5.8No. of Retirements 1,003 1,051 1,280 21.8 27.6

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Scheme activity re growth in the number of Pensioners and new Retirees/Lump sums shows a significant growth. With the continuation of VES, for example, it is anticipated that this trend of high activity will continue.

HSCPS will continue to deal with the demands arising from the outworking’s of the Hutton Review and the wider planned changes in governmental pension arrangements.

4.2 NIFRS

From September 1st 2015, BSO has signed an SLA with Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service (NIFRS) to provide Pension Services. This will entail transferring NIFRS Scheme data on to HSC servers and the employment of two new staff. The cost of the Scheme software and additional staff resources required will be charged to NIFRS.

4.3 Trust Liaison Officers

As a result of significant changes to all Public Pensions as a result of Pension Reform and in particular the changes to the HSC Pension Schemes, Employers across the service have voiced their concerns re additional workload and intricacy of this legislation. HR Directors have noted that whilst the Scheme is administered centrally by HSCPS, the duty of care to inform Employees of all these changes lies with the Employer. Similarly some changes such as the introduction of Final Pay Controls will have financial consequences for Employers and need careful management and associated communication processes. However in discussion with several Employers it has become apparent that since the centralisation of services such as Payroll there is a gap in knowledge within Employer organisations of the impact of many of these reforms. There is clearly a requirement for a resource to work closely with HSCPS to be aware of the already implemented and upcoming changes to Pension/Tax legislation and ensure that Employers are complying with their legal obligations. Such a resource would also implement a local dedicated communication strategy within organisations to ensure that all relevant staff are aware of the impact that these changes have and the potential consequences of management decisions. HSCPS would work closely with Employers to ensure that they develop and provide a comprehensive set of procedural guides for Scheme members and Employees, and a comprehensive set of Scheme forms and Fact Sheets.

At a meeting of the HR Directors on 8 January 2016 it was agreed that BSO’s Head of Pensions and Assistant Director of Human Resources develop Job Descriptions and Specifications for a Trust Liaison Officer and a Liaison Support Officer to be based within HSCPS. The role of these posts will be to work closely with Employers re the matters outlined above and provide a dedicated resource that Employers can avail of to ensure that their statutory and legal obligations are met regarding Duty of Care. It was agreed that the costs of these posts are to be shared among the Employers based on the numbers of Scheme Members within each Trust.

5. Assurances to Customers

5.1 Customer Survey 2015/16

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95% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the courtesy of Pensions staff;

80% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the quality of advice received from Pensions;

80% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the quality of customer care provided by Pensions.

5.2 Benchmarking:

HSC Pensions has carried out benchmarking exercises in comparison with NILGOSC, NI Teachers and NI Civil Service (NICSPS) pensions;

HSC Pensions has 2,954 pension scheme members per member of staff, against the NICSPS which has 456 pension scheme members per member of staff;

HSC Pensions has participated in CIPFA benchmarking club and is the second most cost effective pension administration compared with 46 other UK providers whilst still delivering on all SLA and KPI targets.

5.3 Customer Forums:

HSCPS established in 2010/11, an Employer’s Forum with representation from Trust Payroll and HR Departments to discuss and assess HSC Pension issues and implications. In early 2013 a General Practitioner Forum was established where scheme and legislative changes affecting GP Superannuation Issues are discussed with GP Representative Bodies and Registered Financial Advisory Groups.

HSCPS also participates in the:

o Inter-judiciary Forum for NHS Pensions organisation in England, Scotland and Wales; and

o Northern Ireland Public Service Pension Group.

6. Summary

Source 2016/17£k

2015/16%

Cash Releasing 0 -Productivity - 2.6

Total 0 2.6

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Directorate: Operations, Counter Fraud and Probity Services


Counter Fraud and Probity Services (CFPS) provide a range of specialist services to HSC bodies and on behalf of the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety. These services include probity / verification activities, (delivering assurances to the HSC Board in relation to c£800 million of Primary Care expenditure), counter fraud criminal investigations on behalf of all HSC bodies and DHSSPS, verification of patient exemptions claimed from statutory dental and ophthalmic charges, fraud prevention (including HSC lead on raising fraud awareness), fraud detection including the newly established forensic data analytics service, administration of the day care foods component of the National Healthy Start Scheme and a new Access to healthcare team which provides advice and guidance to HSC staff on health service legislation and policy in respect of entitlement to accessing free healthcare. Service delivery is closely monitored and agreed with clients, either in terms of agreed processes and deliverables or by formal SLAs.

HSC Trusts need to be proactive in working with CFPS in seeking opportunities to further identify fraud, waste and error across the HSC thereby generating income and delivering savings on a greater scale than is currently the case.

2. Staffing

CFPS has a staffing compliment of 31, with an overall WTE of 29 including four professionally accredited counter fraud specialists. All staff receive training to enable them to carry out their duties.

3. Budget

CFPS has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £1.2m .


Total £1.2m

4. 2016/17 Offering

4.1 Cash Releasing Savings

CFPS will release savings of £35k (2.9%) through in house resource enablement.

4.2 Productivity Savings

CFPS will produce savings of 16.7% (weighted as 0.7%) due to an increase in the level of exemption checks we will process in year. This should have a cash saving effect, however the exact value of this cannot be determined. This productivity saving will come about through improved sifting of claims in year and it is hoped that the value will increase through improved targeting of certain claims. No change in the level of probity claims has been assumed. A weighted

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value of £9,000 has been used based on levels of exemption recoveries for 6,000 exemption checks in 2014/15.

4.2.1 Probity Team

The Probity team delivers a uniform regional verification service to HSCB, providing compliance with Departmental direction. This work is more comprehensive and holistic at a regional level than pre RPA and is being performed with substantially less resource than previously in place for Probity pre establishment of CFPS in 2009.

In 2016/17 there will be further changes to the method by which Dental contractors are selected for probity review within the new shorter (3 year) cycle with greater consideration given to the mixture of random and targeted sampling.

Probity Services is also exploring the possibility of introducing new checks in respect of assurance on the pharmaceutical expenditure. It is expected that a more risk based approach in areas such as Repeat Dispensing and Duplicate prescriptions can be incorporated into routine probity work in 2016/17. All other probity services are at present as per 2015/16 arrangements.

The probity team is on target to meet its SLA obligations in 2015/16. During 2015/16 (to 31st January 2016) actual financial recoveries for the period were £103k.

Patient Exemptions

The exemptions checking process has seen significant growth year on year. The current year will see a further 16.7% increase on year with a projected 7,000 checks being completed.

As part of the exemptions process, recoveries are made from patients who have claimed exemption from Dental and Ophthalmic treatments and their claim for exemption has been found to not been verified. Total recoveries for the period April 2011 to January 2016 were £258k.

A working group has been established to review the exemptions checking process. To date the process has been refined with further planned changes to the treatments selected for checking and the case management system being considered to reduce the level of manual input and make the process more efficient

The current figures on a pro rata, when compared on an annual basis against previous years, have increased slightly, however, in light of the review of the exemptions process, the financial recovery figures are expected to increase in 2016/17, again within current staffing resources.

Probity Trend

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Exemption Trends - Number of Exemptions Checks

Exemptions 2011/12 2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 As atJan 2016

Exemptions from Dental Ophthalmic charges

4,000 5,016 5,004 6,094 5503

ExemptionsFinancialRecoveries

2011/12£k

2012/13£k

2013/14£k

2014/15£k

As atJan 2016

£kActual Figures 36 48 52 55 67

Please note – Projections on exemption checks are forecasted to reach 7,000 for year ending 2016/17, Projected financial recoveries are also expected to increase over and above 2015/2016 levels shown due to changes in how we target exemption ineligibility in the future.

4.2.2 Fraud Investigations Team

Fraud Investigations

Investigations

2011/1 2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 As atJan 2016

Cases 65 84 146 189 177*

One Year Trend

Investigations 2013/14 2014/15 Increase%

HSC referrals 146 189 29.45

Investigation casework undertaken is highly varied in nature, ranging from the straightforward to the highly complex and resources expended will vary accordingly. Consequently, it is not possible to measure productivity in the same way as a purely transactional service producing identical items.

The number of investigations conducted from 2011/2012 to date indicates a strong annual growth in case load investigations. CFPS is currently funded for 5 investigative staff and will endeavour to maintain current caseload levels within its existing resource base.

During 2015/16 (to Jan 2016) the number of investigations received by the Investigation Team stands at 177*.

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ProbityServices

2011/12£k

2012/13£k

2013/14£k

2014/15£k

As at Jan 2016 £k

Agreed as Recoverable 149 199 101 112 103

Actual Financial Recovery 111 137 127 136 103

*The figure above includes 84 Fraud Medicinal Report (FMR) Incidents which in previous years were recorded as an Investigation. A change in recording/accounting process was introduced in 15/16. Levels of investigations of all types in 2015/16 have increased

The 29.45% increase on the figures from 2013/14 to 2014/15 (based on current month 10 will increase again in 2015/16) is largely attributable to the following -

1 - CFPS proactive work in projects aimed at tackling persons not ordinarily resident within Northern Ireland.

2 - Online reporting tool addressing prescription fraud which has seen a large increase over the last year.

3 - CFPS engagement in a consultation process with DHSSPS which has successfully led to the amendment of the 2006 Directions ensuring that all appropriate action may now be taken to investigate fraud or corruption against persons placed in accommodation provided or arranged by a HSC body. The new directions became effective from March 2014 and a programme of awareness work and collaboration has taken place with inter alia; HSC clients and PSNI to raise the CFPS profile in this area. It is anticipated that this will continue to be a growing area for fraud referrals in the near future . As a result of this directive we now get a higher number of financial abuse cases which on average take a longer period of time from opening to closing

In the 10 month period (April 2015 to Jan 2016) the team secured 27 prosecutions and financial recoveries. They also investigated, confirmed as non-resident and removed 14 patients from the GP registration system. Each ineligible patient removed from the Patient Registration System, results in a projected saving of approximately £11k over the next five years to HSC. The total saving to the HSC can therefore be crudely calculated at £154k.

CFPS established a working group with Fraud Liaison Officers to refine and improve the case management system aimed at producing more reliable and informative reports for clients and avoid duplication in the process. Improvements have been made in 14/15 with further funding expected to be secured in late 15/16 to help progress further improvements which include portal access for HSC clients enabling then to obtain real-time case updates thereby reducing the need for email or telephone queries and improving the quality of the service.

4.2.3 Fraud Prevention

During 2015/16 CFPS continued with a number of initiatives to increase fraud awareness both throughout HSC organisations and, following the extension of CFPS Directions, to the social care sector. A programme of engagement with the Chair of the Northern Ireland Adult Safeguarding Partnership and the Trust Safeguarding Leads has commenced to develop a collaborative approach when dealing with cases of financial abuse that result in any losses to HSC. A number of new initiatives were undertaken which included the development of a promotional leaflet highlighting how to recognise and report fraud and financial abuse in the social care sector. Other CFPS initiatives included an increase of fraud awareness across HSC organisations. A number of new initiatives were

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undertaken such as the development of a Fraud E-Newsletter issued bi-monthly highlighting recent HSC and NHS fraud cases and a Prescription Fraud E-Newsletter which focuses on fraudulent medication cases. A number of other bespoke materials were developed to assist in this year’s fraud awareness campaign namely info graphics, fact sheets and Fraud Matters newsletters which provided more detail on the work of CFPS.

From April 2015 to January 2016 there have been:

23 fraud awareness presentations (internal and external) 9 road shows 6 information kiosks at HSC events 17 fraud alerts; 3 fraud bulletins 78 tweets receiving 30,492 impressions 6,846 visitors to the CFPS website and 12,931 page views (until 8 Feb

2016)

The presentations and awareness events were delivered to over 3,600 HSC staff, which was a greater number than the previous year, due to having awareness sessions in larger venues with more attendees. . In 2016/17 CFPS will be targeting ‘face to face’ fraud awareness presentations mainly to individuals employed within the social care sector. The amount of contact with staff is actually much higher from engagement with large sections of HSC employees at information kiosks and roadshows.

The CFPS website is currently under redevelopment to ensure it evolves with customer expectation.

CFPS once again participated in International Fraud Awareness Week. During this week CFPS hosted a number of fraud awareness events in conjunction with HSC organisations. An online survey designed to gauge the level of fraud awareness was issued to HSC staff and over 800 responses were received. CFPS engagement with the Executive Information Service, DHSSPS and HSC Communication Officers during this week, to promote the fraud awareness message on intranet sites and social media platforms resulted in a 92,000 outreach on social media. Local TV and radio interviews led to a 300,000 outreach on media platforms.

Fraud Liaison Officer workshops were held in October 2015 and January 2016 to discuss and share lessons learnt from fraud investigations and plan a regional approach to prevent and detect fraud within HSC.

4.2.4 Fraud Detection

The work undertaken by the Access to Health Care team is varied and their remit extends to Primary, Secondary and Social Care, which includes:

The formulation of guidance in response to queries relating to assessment of patient entitlement to access of health and social care services;

The creation of a centre of expertise and specialist advice for HSC staff; The provision and/or securing of awareness and specialist training for HSC

staff; The creation of a key HSC liaison point with the Home Office;

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The monitoring of compliance with regulations and regional (in due course); Reviewing legislation and reciprocal agreements for inconsistencies in order

to bring this to the attention of DHSSPS in order that they can issue clear guidance to the HSC bodies.

The team engage with key stakeholders with a view to improving the processes for identifying patients who are either chargeable or ineligible to register for health services and to assist where appropriate in the design, development and implementation of new methods of working, which are systematic and compliant with relevant legislative requirements, which will serve to reduce the number of these patients which will ultimately produce either income generation for certain services provided or savings where services are not provided. It will also produce a mechanism by which to measure these results enabling better use of resources and assisting with the protection of public funds.

By providing advice and guidance to HSC staff on entitlement to access health care in Northern Ireland, this educates and informs staff, raising their level of understanding which in turn will assist in reducing the numbers of persons accessing health services in Northern Ireland when they are not entitled or claiming free services when they are chargeable, which may previously have gone undetected. In real terms, each ineligible patient removed from the Patient Registration System, results in a projected saving of approximately £2,109 per patient to the HSC. By increasing the number of patients identified as chargeable, will result in savings to the HSC as the process acts as a deterrent, therefore there should be less persons to identify over time and going forward the Trust’s will also be able to withhold or delay elective or non-emergency treatment.

Pro-active work and futureThe CFPS Access to healthcare team checked circa 35,000 registrations for entitlement to access healthcare and communicated with almost 2000 patients in a 4 week period, resulting in 136 patients being referred for removal from the list during this time. This equates to £286k in annual savings to the HSC with a projected saving of £1.43m over a 5 year period. During the year the team provided advice and guidance for over 300 queries and delivered 38 training sessions to HSC staff. The team also assisted two HSC Trusts to undertake pilots determining eligibility for free treatment and verified a further 87 patients, of which 57 were not verified as eligible to receive free treatment. This pilot has proved to be extremely successful with the hope being to roll out further in other areas within these trusts as well as rollout within the remaining trusts not piloted so far.

In the 2015/2016 financial year the team added the provision of a forensic data analyst service and identified a number of projects with large estimated savings to be made by the future roll out across HSC, projects such as the screening of supplier details, to prevent payments being diverted away from the intended recipients. The forensic data analyst as well as supporting the Access to Health team, continues to work with Trust representatives to identify new projects for the detection of fraud across their services.Future proposals include screening cost overruns to prevent fraudulent claiming against HSC projects, putting in place systems to ensure those deducted from GP lists as not entitled to free health care are prevented from re-entering the system, unless they can provide evidence of entitlement and extending

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screening to secondary care services such as Accident & Emergency and Outpatients

4.2.5 Healthy Start

In 2014/15 797 clients were registered with BSO. The team made reimbursement payments of £580k and supplied 1,809 vitamin tablets and drops. In 2015/16 and onwards the uptake seems to have levelled off with the likelihood being that the initial surge and increase being due to a drive from the DHSSPS in writing to 14,000 households to raise awareness of the availability of this scheme.

4.3 Assurance to Customers

4.3.1 Benchmarking

In 2014 CFPS completed a benchmarking exercise which demonstrated CFPS is more cost effective and carry out more fraud prevention work than similar bodies across the UK. In summary: Staff cost per FTE is below average at £36.2k compared to £47.7k UK

Average; Higher than average number of days spent on prevention work; Total staff cost per completed case is below average at £2.86 compared to

£2.94.

4.3.2 Customer Survey 2015/16

92% rated the service as good or very good; 100% said the service has improved over the last 12 months 100% rated our information and correspondence as effective; 100% said our staff were courteous; 100% were satisfied with the quality of advice.

4.3.3 Customer Forum(s)

CFPS participate in monthly and quarterly customer forums with the HSC Board, HSC Trusts and DHSSPS. This provides an important level of engagement with HSC clients to monitor and promote the quality of the services we provide.

5. Summary

Source 2016/17£k

2016/17%

Cash releasing 35 2.9Productivity - 0.7

Additional income - -Total 35 3.6

Directorate: Customer Care and Performance Information Technology Services

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BSO ITS is responsible for the delivery and support of a wide range of regional ICT Services to all HSC organisations in Northern Ireland. In addition to supporting mature ‘Business as Usual’ (BAU) systems, ITS is commissioned through the HSCB eHealth annual commissioning plan to deliver major ICT projects to the HSC which includes complex business case production, large procurements, implementations and support.

1.1. The Shared Public Data Centre Project

BSO ITS are one of the major contributors to this project which has procured two new, state of the art datacentres to replace the legacy facilities in the City and Royal hospitals. The procurement awarded a new contract for two ‘Tier 3’ datacentres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_center#Data_center_tiers) to BT. The new datacentre facilities are contracted to be available from August 2016. The design of the new infrastructure platform (value approximately £6 million) is nearing completion and is planned to be ordered in time to be delivered and commissioned in August 2016. The testing process and migration from the legacy datacentres is planned to take approximately 12 months.

1.2 Expansion of Shared ServicesITS led the completion of scoping studies for the expansion of elements of shared services within BSO during summer 2015. This included a specific study for IT services. Scoping information was gathered from HSC organisations using an agreed template. Information related to the existing landscape in terms of technology deployed and the IT staffing resource.

BSO also led a similar study on Business intelligence across HSC. Deloitte are due to report in late February 2016 following the feasibility studies into the proposed expansion of shared services. It is anticipated that ITS will have a major role to play in the design and establishment of expanded shared services for IT and BI if this goes ahead.

1.3 ISO 20000BSO ITS were successful in extending scope of ISO 20000 to include ECR, FPL and Integration services and in February 2016 retained accreditation in the third bi-annual surveillance audit. The scope will be extended to include more service areas in 2016/17.

2. Staffing

ITS has a complement of 222 staff (158 core funded staff and 64 staff funded from the regional HSC ICT Programme). ITS also have seven Placement Students from Ulster University and Queens University, six ICT Apprentices and one Graduate Intern. The majority of technical staff (>95%) having a relevant computing degree. The apprentice scheme was very successful in its first year proposals have been developed enhance this in future years. All service areas have a development objective to have team members trained in at least ITIL v3 Foundation and where appropriate PRINCE 2.

3. Budget

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ITS has an operating budget of £6.75m. In addition, ITS has responsibility for the management and control of approximately £19.2m annual expenditure from the ICT Programme budget in the current year.

Pay (core funded staff only) £6.0mNon Pay £0.7mTotal £6.7m

4. 2015-16 Offering

4.1 Productivity

Demand for ITS services continues to increase year on year to meet the increased number of new systems and end-users. Expectations of availability and access to services has also increased with demands for 24/7 availability of systems and access to service-desk support. ITS has addressed the initial demand for 24/7 availability by operating a rolling rota of cover for key infrastructure services and for the GP Out of Hours service. ITS is currently developing costed options for extending the service to 7 day and 24 hour working.

In general, there has been an increased level of demand for IT services from BSO ITS customers. In some areas this increased demand is resourced through the addition of staff dedicated to a particular project but in many of the steady state service areas the increased demand continues to be met through increased productivity.

All work carried out by ITS is on the basis of incidents and service requests logged with the service desk. If the service desk call relates to an ICT service not working correctly and needing to be fixed, then this equates to an incident. If the call relates to a new piece of work, a configuration request or in some instances a transactional event, then this is a service request. While service requests may vary in size and scope, even the largest requests are likely to be of a manageable size related to a specific task rather than, for instance, a whole project. This means that over the period of a year, taken together the combination of incidents and service requests are best overall measure of productivity. Some of the specific measures and impact in specific areas are detailed in the drivers described below.

Table 1 overleaf sets outs the growth in Service Requests, Incidents and changes during the 2014/15/16 years and the sections below outline some of the key drivers for those in increases.

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Table 1 - Service Desk Utilisation Trends 2012 - 2016

Table 2

'09/10 10/11 11/12 12/13 13/14 14/15 15/160

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

Number of Incidents, Service and Change Requests per Year

Incidents

Service Requests

Change Requests

Year

Num

ber o

f Cal

ls pe

r Yea

r

The information provided in Table 1 shows that while incident reporting has significantly reduced over the last few years, the number of Service Requests has been stable in the last year. When reflecting on the decrease in incidents we believe this indicates increasingly stable, high quality service provision. Additionally improvement processes such as the problem process which ultimately lead to reduction in incidents require resources in order to implement such improvements. A significant example of substantial improvement activity that has reduced incidents but requires a high amount of effort is the ISO 20000 implementations that have been completed in 2015 and 2016.

It is anticipated that there will be an upward trend for service requests will continue into 2016/17 because of planned expansion to services such as NIFRS. The addition of the NIFRS service will expand the number of users supported by approximately 3,000 and RQIA will add another c200 users. The NIFRS users will also undergo a complete replacement of their existing IT infrastructure and it is anticipated that this will cause a jump in both incidents and service requests throughout 2016/17. By their nature Service requests more resource intensive. Categorising emergent repeated issues as problems and following best practice processes to deal with root cause of issues requires

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Description 12/13 13/14 14/15 15/16 (Est.)

Incidents 15,726 14,874 11,352 10,875Service Requests 32,045 36,014 40,476 39,182Change Requests 1,059 1,241 1,275 1,051Total 48830 52129 53,103 51,109

considerable time investment however it leads to long-term reduction in incidents.

The key drivers for service requests have been:

Supporting infrastructure growth – Servers, Processors and Storage;

Increase in email storage and mailbox growth;

Increase in client devices and tablets;

New VOIP telephony;

New Blackberry management infrastructure and Devices deployed across all regional bodies

Increase in remote access to email etc. from home;

Increasing wireless capacity through increasing Wi-Fi access points;

Increase in managed system integration;

Improvements to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery including the provision and testing of a Mobile Datacentre contingency facility;

Increase in demands on data warehousing.

4.1.1 Productivity and Service Requests in Functional areas

The following business areas have all shown increase in workload and productivity over the 2015/16 year.

4.1.2 Supporting Infrastructure Growth- Servers, Processers and Storage

The recently established ‘Technical Operations’ support function proactively manages and monitors the availability of the technical infrastructure with particular focus on the key performance parameters within that area.

All IT systems, both existing and new have to be supported by a robust IT infrastructure of physical IT servers and the data collated has to be stored, some of it for an infinite period. This is an area within ITS which continued to experience considerable growth in 2015/16.

Rollout during 2015/16 of increased storage virtualisation continues to improve resiliency and redundancy by reducing complexity, and enforcing standards;

Rolling upgrade of the VMware server virtualisation software across all of the datacentre servers has increased reliability continues to improve functionality;

A rolling upgrade to IE11 and Java 1.8 was performed for 2900 client devices;

Upgraded Firmware and VIOS Virtualisation software on IBM Unix servers;

Migrated NIGALA, NIPEC,CEC and Leadership Centre ICT infrastructure under BSO ITS management;

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Deployed and/or Upgraded Jabber Unified Communications client to managed PC’s;

4 x Legacy Active Directory Domains decommissioned;

VMware upgraded to 5.1u3 across all blade servers;

There was an increase of 12% (1422>1597) over the period in the number of Windows and UNIX servers supported;

There has been an increase of 13% (1074TB -> 1214TB) during 2015 in data storage capacity;

Early estimates suggest this team will continue to absorb a high level of growth in 2016/17.

4.1.3 Email Storage and Mailbox Growth

The number of Mailboxes increased from 7315 to 8400 – the increase of Mailboxes of 1085 represents 15% growth in that area;

The number of annual email transactions increased from 28.3M to 39.9M, representing an increase of 41%.

4.1.4 Client Devices/Tablets

The number of client devices supported during 2015/16 increased by 10.5% against those supported in 2014/15. The tablet user base continues to grow and ITS expect a significant increase in the number of tablets in 2016/17. Given that the number of desktops and laptops will not significantly diminished this is an area where ITS will be making a business case for resources to deliver services in 2016/17.

4.1.5 VOIP (Internet) Telephony

From a baseline of zero during 2012/13, 2362 Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) desktop telephones have been rolled-out and supported across all sites largely through the use of new toolsets and using the existing complement of staff. As expected this state of the art technology significantly grew during 2015/16. Demand has grown from 1,994 devices to 2,362 devices representing a growth of 18.5%. Additional resources to continue supporting this service have been identified but are still pending recruitment.

4.1.6 Blackberry Replacement

ITS replaced the obsolete Blackberry fleet for all regional bodies with a new management infrastructure and new devices (primarily the “Blackberry Leap”). All phones were also moved to a new Vodafone contract which provided “normal calls” at no extra cost and a reduced monthly cost for all devices. This exercise allowed the size of the deployed blackberry fleet to be reviewed and any unnecessary or unused devices to be decommissioned. The current supported base for regional bodies is approximately 880 devices. Line rental savings alone on the new contract for all regional bodies equate to over £50K per annum.

4.1.7 Remote Access to Email, Etc. From Home – RPA2 Organisations & GP’s

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Remote access accounts have increased by 2,734 to 7,285 in the 2015/16 year. This majority of this increase represents the extra contractors (Pharmacists, Dentists, Opticians and GPs) who were given this facility in 2015/16 and represents an increase in growth of 60%.

4.1.8 Wi-Fi Capability

This is another area of significant continuing growth with 366 access points now installed. This represents an increase of 49% during 2015/16.

4.1.9 Integration

This team supports over 1,700 system-to-system interfaces and this number continues to increase as more data is shared between systems. A number of new interfaces were developed in 2015/2016, including a gradual roll out of the E-Referrals web interface to PAS, continual development of interfaces to RISOH, development of existing Diamond interfaces to use HL7 messaging, new interfaces for Savience and a continual development of the new Web Service Interfaces allowing systems to write back to Clinicom PAS.

The Web Service Interfaces to PAS which Integration have developed have enabled a variety of systems region wide to begin writing back to PAS - such as NIECR for E-Referrals, Openward for admissions and discharges, Aura Flow for admissions and discharges, Savience self-service kiosks for demographic lookups and a new interface to allow NIMATS to register new births on PAS immediately.

Work continues on initiatives to improve the sharing, reuse and quality of data across HSC systems. For example, the team has developed new interfaces to enable greater data quality in a variety of regional systems, including a web service based interface to update GP details from NHAIS to PAS Masterfiles, a new interface from NIECR’s MPI to Belfast Link Labs to help BLL improve their data quality and new functionality to allow NIECR’s MPI to store temporary HCNs from the Northern Ireland Broker which supplies NIPACS and which has now enabled NIECR to provide an Order Comms functionality.

Changes to the underpinning major systems (such as Clinicom PAS upgrades), data centre migrations and upgrades to toolsets will necessitate significant resourcing in the coming year to ensure continuity of service.

Overall workload is expected to increase 20% in this area in 2016/17.

4.1.10 Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

The creation in 2013 of a Business/IT Service Catalogue held in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) significantly enhanced the ITS capability to manage and/or recover supported systems and applications. Each Service has specific service continuity documentation and operational run books. Each service has clearly defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), and an agreed priority tiering for recovery in the event of a Major Incident, or invocation of Business Continuity procedures. The operational run books for each system enhance availability by proactively managing the applications, enforcing standards and policies, providing real time reporting, and ensuring a full audit trail is available. ITS will be working with HSC Heads of IT to agree how this information can be integrated into organisation business continuity plans

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4.2 Business Cases and Contract Management

In 2015/16 a total of 74 Business cases were developed by ITS teams and subsequently approved by HSCB or DHSSPS. ITS will continue to develop technical business cases into 2016/17 and if commissioned to develop regional system business cases will seek to have this work resourced appropriately.

The table below details how ITS has renegotiated a substantial number of contracts. This will enable the delivery of monetary savings in the order of approximately £578k for 2015/16 for the HSC. This is returned to the commissioner for redistribution.

Project/Area Description Savings Area 2016/17£‘000

GMS network replacement

Network revenue savings

The new network upgraded capacity of all GP network links to Fibre based connectivity (10, 30, 100Mb depending on size) and replaced the local area network equipment in each practice

395

HCN Support contract

Revenue Savings As the exit from the current contract for HCN support has progressed, year on year savings continue to be realized for email and internet support.

183

Total 578

4.3 Non-Monetary and Value Added Benefits

The following paragraphs detail a number of initiatives and innovations delivered by ITS. A number of these service improvements and enhancements will enable efficiencies to be realised by HSC customers in terms of time, money and patient safety.

4.3.1 Community, Social Services and Primary Care – GMS ICT

Further rollout of CCG The GMS ICT team continue to increase the number of referral types and

service users. Additional areas covered now include: Tissue Viability; Occupational Therapy; Obstetrics; and Audiology.

Further referrals types are in development and will shortly be available for operational use. These include: District Nursing (BHSCT); various Cardiac services; Dermatology Photo Triage; Paediatrics & CAMHS, Ophthalmology and Dentistry

Preparation for the migration of EMIS LV Practices to EMIS Web EMIS have served notice that they will be withdrawing their LV practice

management system from the market in early 2016/2017. 107 GP practices currently use LV in NI and preparation is well advanced for moving them to alternative systems. 105 of the 107 plan to move to EMIS Web. This is a system that, rather than being hosted in the practice, will be hosted centrally

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in the EMIS datacentres in Leeds. The GMS ICT team, supported by colleagues in the Infrastructure teams, have:

agreed specifications for changes to EMIS Web software to accommodate NI specific functionality;

agreed the specification of the Leeds datacentre infrastructure; upgraded the communications link between NI and Leeds to help ensure

security, performance reliability and resilience; established a test practice to be used to test resilience, reliability,

performance and functionality; liaised with other system providers to ensure their systems are adapted to

continue to meet NI GP practices’ requirements when interfacing with EMIS Web; and

established 3 pilot practices to help better understand the degree of fit of EMIS Web to NI and to better understand the requirements and impact of the migration.

The remaining practices are planned to be migrated by September 2016.

Various changes to GP practice systems and services, including: the introduction of the “eMed3 fit note” that now enables practices to send fit

notes to DSD; the expansion of the rollout of Patient Facing Services to enable the public to

book GP appointments and order repeat prescriptions online; and updates to QOF to reflect activity related payments to GPs in 2015/16.

Ballymena practices move: GMS ICT staff were instrumental in ensuring the success of the relocation of

6 GP practices into a single Health Centre in Ballymena. Rather than continuing with the technology used separately in the individual practices, the design of the infrastructure delivered the solution via a set of virtual servers shared between the practices.

GP Out Of Hours and NIAS: Work is at a very advanced stage for the introduction of the Adastra GP Out

Of Hours (OOH) system into NIAS. By the end of March 2016, all providers of GP OOH will have tested, signed off and adopted the upgraded version of the OOH system. In addition, NIAS GP staff will have been added to the system as a 5th provider. This will enable NIAS GPs to record, triage, manage and pass calls as appropriate.

GP2GP Record Transfer Good progress was made in 2015/2016 in respect of designing a solution to

enable a patient’s records to be electronically transferred when a patient moves to a new practice. A detailed specification will be available for all aspects of the solution before 31st March 2016.

4.3.2 Community, Social Services and Primary Care – Community Systems

Child Health System and Service enhancements: Child Health staff specified and established an interface between Dept. Ed.

C2K and CHS for the transfer of school roll information needed to schedule school nurse visits.

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In response to concerns that HPE could withdraw their CHS related services, BSO ITS established medium to long term arrangements to secure the future development and support of the system. An agreement has been reached with HPE that they will continue to support and develop the system for the next 3 to 5 years. Critically, this agreement includes an obligation for HPE to provide training and mentoring to an expanded BSO ITS CHS team. The expanded team is funded by HSC ICT Programme monies and, in time, will provide appropriate contingency should HPE decide to withdraw their services; and

Child Health staff continued to enhance the CHS Data warehouse throughout 2015/2016. This will provide more easy access to analysis of CHS information in support of both delivery and planning. The solution will reduce the effort required for manual collation of such information and will also provide analyses that is currently not manually derivable.

UNOCINI UNOCINI has been further enhanced with the addition of functionality to help

manage the “Looked After Children” (LAC) care pathway. BSO ITS Community staff specified the required changes and oversaw the development by the external providers. This new software will help ensure protocols are adhered to and appropriate records are kept.

The data-warehouse capability for SOSCARE data continues to grow. A series of required reports and returns have been developed by the community team which will significantly reduce the effort required by Trust staff in meeting the information demands of the HSCB and DHSSPS.

eNISAT The BSO Community Team were instrumental in designing V4 of the NISAT

assessment tool. The new version has been developed and delivered by the supplier and it will be implemented in the coming weeks. V4 addresses some concerns voiced by certain services about the usability of the previous version which were preventing them using NISAT. It is expected that the introduction of V4 will significantly increase NISAT usage across the HSC.

4.3.4 Data Warehouse and New Systems Development

Increased productivity in the Data Warehouse service can be summarised in the table below.

Description 2010/11 2011/12 2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 2015/16 2015/16 increase

Business Objects Universes

18 24 48 73 89 100 12

Business Objects Users

792 921 1091 1202 1408 1569 11%

There has been growth in both the functional and geographical scope of the Regional Data Warehouse in the last 12 months. This growth will continue as there are additional new data sets (e.g. GP electronic referrals) currently in a test environment and a programme of work is in place to continue expansion to other Community services. Initial work on incorporating FPL and HRPTS datasets has been completed. A new Business Objects (BOXI) licencing model

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was applied and preparation for migration to BOXI R4 is underway. Data has been extracted from 4 of the legacy business applications (Pharmacy, Travel, Debtors Billing and General Ledger) and loaded into the Regional Data Warehouse. Data has also been extracted from the new Pharmaceutical payment system and HSCB have self-service access to reporting for this area of major expenditure. A Public facing webpage for ED waiting times was developed and successfully launched in October 2015. The regional ED Pressures dashboard is being expanded to include additional sites and additional indicators.

The “Honest Broker” service is now fully operational for both internal HSC and external researcher purposes. To date 15 projects have been completed, 5 are underway and 74 enquiries have been handled.

The growth of the use of the Regional Data Warehouse brings an additional support workload. This will be achieved within the existing staff complement; the additional demand equating to 0.3 of a data warehouse resource.

During 15/16 the New Systems Development team (NSD) developed and implemented a Service and Budget Agreement Funding and Activity Change Tracker system (FACTS) for HSCB. The team also delivered a package of enhancements to the FPPS Pharmaceutical module.

NSD has supplied technical and project expertise to the development of new Information systems for the PHA that include Physical Activity Referral Systems (PARS) and Obesity tracker. The new PARS system has concluded Project Refinement and is entering Development phase for a rollout to 100+ Council Leisure Centre administrators and Exercise professionals and 10+ PHA staff. The PARS system development will continue until an envisaged go live date of April 17.

NSD is currently involved in the requirements and system design phase of the Extra Contractual Referrals System for HSCB to include patient travel and invoice reimbursement for patients treated outside of the HSC. It is envisaged that this project will begin development phase by Sept/Oct 16.

The team continues to refactor existing systems to the MVC toolset to enable on-going support and also to provide service improvements such as the SSNAP toolset extract and the introduction of Single Sign-on to the 50+ users of Stroke Information Management System.

These refinements are also being added to BSO Procurement and Logistics Services Ringback and Single Tender Action applications with its user base of 30+ users throughout BSO PALS, NHSCT and BHSCT.

The BSO Audit Recommendation Tracker (ART) system has also been rewritten and is out for user acceptance testing.

4.3.5 eHealth Programme

Northern Ireland Electronic Care Record:

The growth of NIECR is fundamental to the digital transformation programme required to enable the strategic desire to move to a single shared patient record for everyone in Northern Ireland.

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In December 2015 over 13,500 unique, active users accessed NIECR which, in 2 years, already exceeds Business Case targets of 10,000 users within 7 years.

The NIECR has been used by Health and Social Care professionals to inform the treatment of 775,000+ patients (~43% of total Northern Ireland population).

In September 2014, NIECR was integrated into the GP Out of Hours (OOH) systems in all HSC locations and has already been used to access over 95,000 patient records in provision of care.

Around 130 GP practices can now access NIECR at the click of a button which will launch NIECR in the context of the patient being viewed in the GP system.

In a recent user survey of 2308 NIECR users

95.13% stated NIECR saved them time;

10% estimated NIECR saved over 2 hours per day;

31.5% estimated NIECR saved between 30 minutes and 1 hour;

56.5% thought that NIECR allowed the user to make a better decision around referring/admitting/discharging patients;

56% thought NIECR was helpful in preventing a duplicate diagnostic request or investigation;

73.6% stated that NIECR improved the quality of patient care.

eReferrals Triage Management

The NIECR team have developed and implemented an eReferrals Triage Management tool which is live throughout NHSCT, deployed in BHSCT in several specialties with deployment imminent in WHSCT. This solution removes paper from the GP – Hospital referral process and, using a function developed by BSO ITS integration team, can register the referral directly onto PAS.

In 2015/16 the NIECR eTriage solution won the Chairman’s award for technical innovation in NSHCT as well as the HSCNI eHealth innovation award.

Benefits of Referrals Triage

Fully paperless process Automated OP referral registration Informed referral triage decision making using NIECRs rich clinical data set Safe and fully auditable 80% of GP electronic referrals in NHSCT now completed on PAS (appointed,

added to Waiting List or Discharged) within 3 days from GP electronically referring.

Around 30% of all GP electronic referrals completed (Per above) on the same day GP made referral

Potential to release portering and administrative staff to support direct clinical care areas e.g. wards, EDs and 7-day working.

Electronic Document Transfer Framework

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Reusing technologies developed by the BSO ITS Integration team to transmit documents from Patient Centre electronically to NIECR. The eHealth team has worked with GP electronic document suppliers to create a framework which enables the transfer of documents electronically from Hospital to General Practice. This has the potential to provide the following benefits:

Reduction in time taken to transfer a document;

Reduce the need to print up to 2.5 million patient centre documents per year;

Save time opening and scanning documents in General Practice.

The eHealth team are rolling-out the EDT solution from February – May 2016 from which date all GP practices will be receiving patient centre discharge and clinic letters created on PAS. HSCNI trusts will be in a position to ‘turn off’ the creation of this paper following evaluation of the performance of the solution – this is planned for June/July 2016.

The eHealth team will also implement CaPPS into the EDT framework to enable authorised CaPPS letters to be automatically electronically transferred to General Practice.

Radiology Orders

The implementation of radiology orders within NIECR was piloted in September 2015 – February 2016 in each of the 5 HSCNI trusts with over 8000 radiology requests processed via NIECR by ~300 pilot users. The Radiology orders solution creates a single standard interface for radiology ordering throughout HSCNI.

All GPs can also use the NIECR orders solution and once all GP systems are integrated to launch NIECR, the ordering functionality will be directly accessible from their system in patient context.

The BHSCT are changing their RVH Radiology Information system in 2016 and NIECR radiology orders will be integrated into the new solution.

There are many benefits from placing radiology orders electronically, these include

o Reduced operational costs Reduction in manual processes e.g. secondary relabeling / data entry in Lab Reduced volume of telephone calls made/received due to missing order

information and ability for the clinician to track the status of the order

o Improved data accuracy and completeness Reduced transcription errors due to legibility issues on hand written order

cards Quality improvements with consistent clinical data collection

o Demand Management Reduction in the number of tests performed due to ordering of potentially

unnecessary duplicate tests Controlled ordering process through permissions and predefined order sets

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Potential to release portering and administrative staff to support direct clinical care access e.g. wards, EDs and 7-day working.

Problem List, Medicines Reconciliation and Immediate Discharge

In 2016 NIECR is planning to produce a regionally available Immediate Discharge Summary developed in line with GAIN guidelines.

This will help provide the following benefits:

Improved quality of information at the transfer of care from secondary to primary,

Enhanced patient safety Reduced likelihood of readmissions due to e.g. incomplete information

meaning that patient medication is not correct.

The Immediate Discharge Summary will be automatically populated with problems and medications recorded in NIECR and relevant to the patient’s stay,

Significantly reducing the time taken to produce the discharge letter and thereby improve flow, enable discharge earlier in the day, reduce 12-hour breeches, and reduce evening demand on NIAS

Reduced safety risk associated with transcribing this information into a discharge letter in other non-integrated HSC systems.

Time can be saved in preparing the discharge note by reusing information already contained in NIECR such as coded problems, results and medicines as well as episode details and patient demographics. These can be pulled in without the junior doctor having to type these again for the purpose of the discharge note. This will release clinical time to patient care

The potential to transform clinical processes and redirect staff to support clinical audit/other activities.

Medicines ReconciliationNIECR will deliver a single, curated list of adverse reactions, alerts and diagnoses. This will enhance access to the patient’s key medical and care history and allow this data to be reused within NIECR e.g. in care pathways, discharge letters thus ensuring information most relevant for patient safety is prioritised, releasing clinicians’ time for patient care and reducing duplication of data entry.

Use of NIECR to enhance medicines optimisation processes will contribute to general benefits for patients and healthcare professionals:

Standardised format to record legible, coded, accurate, fully reconciled medicines details at transfers of care across all HSC services

Reduces current paper storage requirements Reduced medication errors at admission and discharge(decision support,

reduced transcription, legibility, accuracy, completeness of medicines information)

More appropriate prescribing Discharge communication to primary care is uniform, clear, accurate ,

complete, GAIN compliant Reduced time taken to communicate discharge information to the GP-

immediately available within ECR

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Reduced time taken to create the discharge letter (auto-population of coded information where appropriate e.g. demographics, GP details, episode details, relevant labs, allergy details)

Coded discharge information to enable more accurate clinical coding

Potential to release medical staff time for patient care and pharmacy time to support clinical areas e.g. wards EDs and 7-day working. This also has the potential to release portering staff to support timely transfer of patients or test samples and thereby reduce the need for ‘batching’.

Care Pathways: A Diabetes Care Pathway has been developed within NIECR with input from health and social care professionals across the spectrum of diabetes care providers. This is being refined and deployed in SEHSCT, where over 2000 patients have already registered, and into WHSCT before regional roll-out.

The diabetes pathway is the first step towards a truly integrated shared care pathway for those patients with long term conditions. The pathway is complemented by the clinically rich NIECR patient record.

Benefits Include:

Enabling an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to a patients care Reduced variance in processes where health and social care professionals

can update the patient record in relation to their diabetes treatment and make this information immediately available via NIECR to all health and social care professionals who have an interest in the patients care

Potential to integrate and ultimately replace the existing Diamond and Twinkle database systems.

Key Information Summary: Scheduled for delivery in mid-2016 the Key Information Summary project will augment the Emergency Care Summary dataset to include valuable patient information from General Practice and present this in NIECR. This will make information such as:

Primary Diagnosis Secondary Diagnoses Date of Diagnosis Is patient aware of diagnosis? Yes / No Key GP Out of Hours Medical Arrangements Key District Nurse Specialists Involved Current Medication Emergency Drugs Left at Home: Out of Hours Nursing Arrangements: District Nurse Marie Curie / Hospice at Home Patients Preferred Place of Care Current Problems & Concerns Past Medical History

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This will be available to service areas, such as OOH and ED, where this information is essential for Patient Care.

Regional Information System for Oncology and Haematology (RISOH) The RISOH system is scheduled for release mid to late 2016 and relies heavily on interfaces developed by the BSO ITS integration team from PAS, the eHealth team for Labs as well as intelligent data match filtering of message feeds provided via the BSO ITS Master Patient Index (MPI). The resultant chemotherapy prescribing and patient summary information will then be made available to NIECR – further enhancing the clinical dataset, providing clinicians with additional information when it most needed to support decision making.

Health and Care Number/NHAIS Replacement Project;

There are two significant events which will impact on two of HSCNIs critical systems:

1. HCNI Infrastructure is aging and support ceases in 2019. 2. NHAIS is planned to be replaced in 2017.

A singe project to replace the Health and Care Number and NHAIS systems has been commissioned from BSO ITS eHealth Programme. The SoC and Business Case are currently under development with the procurement planned to begin in 2016.

4.3.5 Clinical and Secondary Care

NIPACS:

The breast screening imaging service (BIPACS) will be merged with NIPACS in summer 2016 which will provide efficiencies and simplify process.

4.3.6 Infrastructure

H+C Number

Reduced Support costs, to Steria, for the the New HCN Continuations contract continues to be realised year on year. In addition to these savings, full exit has been realised this year from out-sourced email, internet and GP Support services. These additional savings in revenue costs will also continue to be realised year on year until a replacement HCN service is in place.

4.4 Pressures and Challenges

4.4.1 24 Hour Support Cover:

In 2015, a business case for ITS on-call support for HSCB Commissioned Services was developed and approved by the HSCB to cover costs of on-call for some critical commissioned services. This estimated ‘enhanced’ on-call costs to be in region of £170k ((£84k Core-funded and £86k Programme-funded). This budget mainly covers core Infrastructure support but is also being used to cover Integration, GP Out-of-Hours Services and some clinical systems. This current on-call model is ad-hoc with significant service omissions despite

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an increasing customer expectation that all Tier 1, 2, and 3 services have 24 hours support beyond the normal 0900 to 1700 service levels.

ITS is recommending in a paper to its SMT and the HSCB that we move immediately to a further enhanced model and that any future service design, whether a shared service or not, should be based on a 7 Day working model to cover all Tier 0, Tier 1 and where possible appropriate Tier 2 services. This would increase annual on-call and overtime costs from £170k to approximately £600k.

Adoption of this model in the interim still requires acceptance of residual risks. BSO ITS will need to take steps to mitigate these risks in the short-term until a 7 day working model is fully implemented.

4.4.2 Northern Ireland Fire Service

ITS have been engaged with NIFRS in the development of a managed IT service which would provide a BSO IT service and replace the obsolete infrastructure in NIFRS. ITS have a project manager and operation manager currently deployed in NIFRS and NIFRS are currently considering a TUPE transfer of the NIFRS IT staff (excluding Line of Business) as part of a move to a managed service. ITS will deliver a refreshed infrastructure platform and implement ISO20000 based service management in 16/17.

4.5 Overall Growth in Customer demand

4.5.1 BSO ITS funding primarily comes from HSCB in their role as commissioner. ITS Funding has two elements. The first element is funding for Core ITS staff functions. This includes critical elements such as infrastructure services including server and storage provision, networks, security, integration etc. as well as a range of other IT services such as data warehousing. The second element of funding is programme funding aimed at specific projects. The programme funding is a mixture of capital and revenue with some element of this being used to pay for extra staff. These are mainly project managers delivering the projects and services being commissioned using the programme funds. The increase in programme funds does relate directly to the workload delivered by ITS staff as the projects involve running procurements, delivering implementation projects, building and supporting system platforms, creating and supporting interfaces between systems, etc. Much of this work is carried out by core ITS staff rather than those funded by programme.

The table overleaf shows the increase in pay costs, programme revenue and capital since 2011.

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Pay (£)Non-Pay

(£)Revenue

(£) Capital (£)Cap & Rev

(£)2010/11 5,781,474 11,183,177 16,964,651 N/A 16,964,6512011/12 5,989,572 9,634,908 15,624,480 N/A 15,624,4802012/13 6,217,629 12,540,526 18,758,155 8,693,431 27,451,5862013/14 6,862,264 13,565,412 20,427,676 8,667,377 29,095,0532014/15 5,691,806 14,285,422 19,977,228 7,073,657 27,050,8852015/16 5,900,029 14,420,216 20,320,245 4,798,095 25,118,340

4.5.2 There was a significant reduction in HSCB ICT Capital funding in 15/16. This was mainly due to uncertainty over the strategic plans for an Electronic Healthcare Record (eHCR) and its impact on delaying decisions for the replacement of significant services such as the Patient Administration Systems (PAS), the Health and Care Number, Laboratory Services and other regional clinical services provided by BSO ITS.

Revenue funding continues to increase, (1.7% for 2015/16) reflecting the additional resourcing necessary to support the growth in existing services.

4.5.3 Future Demand – Plans for future development of BSO Services will continue to be uncertain until issues around eHCR and introduction of an HSC Shared Service are resolved and clarified. At a minimum we can expect to see a year on year increase in Revenue pressures to support and grow the current services. The introduction of Shared Services and support for an eHCR Programme will require significant Resource commitment from BSO not only to support the individual Programmes, but to ensure continuation of existing services in a difficult change environment. While the costs involved still need to be established, it is clear that any reduction in ITS Revenue budgets, (salaries and programme) will put the strategic aims of HSCNI ICT Service Delivery at a significant and unacceptable risk.

4.6. Assurance to Customers

4.6.1 Customer Survey 2015/16.

ITS Services continue to build on their reputation of being responsive, courteous, and reliable, and of providing a high quality service to our customers. The ITS customer survey from October 2015 demonstrates continued positive feedback across all areas:

81% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the service provided by the BSO ITS Service Desk;

80% of respondents rated the overall service provided by ITS as either good/very good;

92% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the courtesy of BSO ITS staff;

45% of respondents agree that our service has improved over the past 12 months.

4.6.2 Customer Forums

ITS senior managers participate in regular customer forums with the HSCB, HSC Trusts and other customers. In addition, ITS Product Managers meet

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regularly with third party IT providers to ensure contractual commitments are being met and that value for money continue to be achieved.

4.6.3 Data Centre Availability

All appropriate mitigation measures will continue to be taken to help ensure service availability during the interim period prior to the migration of services to a new data centre solution within the next 18-24 months.

5. Summary

5.1 Cash releasing

Changes in how ITS is organised have allowed it to release efficiency savings of £102k from its core budget.

In offering these cash releasing savings, ITS request that these savings to be considered for redeployment in 2 areas:

i) Enhancement of on call to cover further tier 1 services;

ii) Expansion of BI capability to enhance services in Data Warehouse and Honest Broker.

Section 4.4.3 details proposed enhancements to out of hours cover across service areas. Costs are currently split between core and programme - £84k and £86k respectively. If implemented in 16/17, the on-call costs increase from £170k to an estimated £600k may require increased funding from core.

This element still needs agreed with Finance

Source 2016/17 £k 2016/17

Cash Releasing 102 1.5%Productivity - -Additional income -Total 102 1.5%

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Directorate: Customer Care & Performance, Office of Research and Ethics Northern Ireland (ORECNI)


ORECNI provides an ethical review service to protect the rights, dignity and welfare of research participants within the HSC System / NHS and to protect the rights of researchers to perform ethical research and legitimate investigation. Although the main element of its workload emanates from within Northern Ireland, it also provides a service for the national research projects which occur throughout the UK.

Therefore, it is an essential part of the National Research Ethics Service supported in law and policy by the Departments of Health of all four UK countries. Customer surveys consistently demonstrate a high level of customer satisfaction with the service.

2. Staffing

ORECNI is a small service comprising 6 staff (4 of whom work on a part time basis) who support the Health and Social care research ethics committees and the UK wide proportionate ethical review rota.

3. Budget

ORECNI has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £0.22m.


Total £0.22m

4. 2015/16 Offering


4.1.1 In the 2016/17 year ORECNI will receive a savings of the recurring costs of rent, rates, insurance, service charge from landlord, electricity, gas, office cleaning, boiler and fire alarm maintenance due to move to BSO premises at Lissue Industrial Estate West Lisburn.

4.1.3 The cash releasing savings above enable a cash efficiency of £32k which forms a saving proposal against DHSSPS recurrent funding.


5.1. Customer Survey 2015/16

93% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the time taken to complete the service;

97% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with time taken to respond to customer queries;

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99% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the courtesy of ORECNI staff.

5.2. Customer Forum(s)

ORECNI staff meets regularly with customers and clients.

5.3 Quality Assessment

ORECNI and its Research Ethics Committees have full quality accreditation from the national Research Ethics Service.

Summary

Source 2015/16 £k 2015/16 %



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Directorate: Customer Care & Performance, Customer Relations& Service Improvement


The Customer Relations and Service Improvement team manages the following on behalf of the Organisation:

Customer Relations through the management of Service Level Agreements, client liaison, establishment and facilitation of customer forums, customer surveys, monitoring arrangements and issue resolution;

Corporate Performance Management reporting through the Corporate Scorecard and monitoring of Performance against the Annual Business Plan;

Facilitation of Service Improvement and Quality initiatives, including benchmarking and creation of the Annual Quality Report;

Aspects of governance and accountability, including co-ordination of Controls Assurance Standards and risk management arrangements and reporting through the Corporate Risk and Assurance Report; facilitation of the Board Governance Self-Assessment process; supporting the Accountability Review process and liaison with Departmental Sponsor Branch;

Strategic and business planning processes for the Organisation;

Aspects of corporate communications, i.e. production of the monthly Staff Newsletter and Annual Report.

2. Staffing

During 2015/16, the Customer Relations and Service Improvement team had five members of staff, three of whom were permanent.

3. Budget

Customer Relations & Service Improvement has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £0.2m:


Total £0.2m

4. 2016/17 Offering


A planned restructuring of the team will generate a total cash efficiency saving of £17k (8.5%) in 2016/17.

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4.2 Productivity

Customer Relations and Service Improvement has continued to respond to increased demands as the organisation has continued to expand. These have included business planning processes within tighter timeframes and the facilitation of the Board Governance Self-Assessment process. As part of the governance and accountability arrangements, the team continues to facilitate annual workshops for Board members in relation to strategic planning, risk and performance management.

Last year, the team produced the second Annual Quality Report for BSO which is a Departmental requirement under the Quality 2020 Strategy.

With the growth and development of the BSO, additional facilitation work has been carried out in relation to the preparation of Service Level Agreements (e.g. with NIFRS). The team will again endeavour to ensure the agreement and signing of Service Level Agreements with customers within tighter timeframes so they are in place at the beginning of each new financial year. The expansion of BSO has resulted in extra governance arrangements, including the co-ordination of business planning, reporting on risk management and Controls Assurance Standards. Areas facilitated under the corporate Benchmarking Programme also continue to expand.

The Customer Relations and Service Improvement team continues to deliver mandatory Risk Awareness training as an integral part of Induction Training sessions. The number of Induction sessions increased last year due to additional provision being made for staff within Shared Services Centres.

Customer Relations and Service Improvement will continue to deal with the demands arising particularly from the factors outlined above. It is not possible to measure productivity for Customer Relations and Service Improvement in the same way as a transactional service. Resources required to deliver will be kept under review and additional activity will be absorbed where possible.

5. Summary

Source 2016/17 £k 2016/17%


Additional income - -Total 17 8.5%

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Directorate: Customer Care & Performance, Equality and Human Rights


The role of the Equality Unit is to support the Business Services Organisation and ten other HSC organisations in mainstreaming equality, diversity and human rights in their work. This includes providing training, support in policy development and implementation (equality screening and equality impact assessments), developing good practice initiatives, facilitating the development of strategies and action plans, preparing equality schemes and annual reviews of progress and providing information and briefings to staff.

2. Staffing

The Equality and Human Rights Department has four members of staff.

3. Budget

The Department has an operating budget for 2015-16 of £0.2m:


Total £0.2m

4. 2016/17 Offering

4.1 Productivity

Equality Services were restructured in 2011 to align more closely with customer organisations. This resulted in a significant reduction of the Equality Unit budget. The savings were passed on to customers in full.

The Equality Unit utilises SAGE time recording to generate evidence of increased productivity achieved through partnership working.

During 2015-16, the Equality Unit experienced and absorbed significant additional demand from clients in relation to the Five Year Review of Equality Schemes, equality screening and Equality Impact Assessment support, as well as the delivery of specialist equality screening and Equality Impact Assessment training, with additional training needs being identified by clients and met in year.

In 2016-17, the Equality Unit anticipates to experience and absorb further additional demand relating to support on the following:

equality screenings – arising from the introduction of tighter mechanisms for mainstreaming equality screening in decision-making by client organisations

Equality Impact Assessments Equality monitoring – collection and analysis of monitoring data in relation

to both employment and services.

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These increased service demands are likely to arise as a result of the findings from the Five Year Review of Equality Schemes, facilitated by the Unit for each client during 2015/16.

Moreover, the Unit will need to absorb an increase in workload from the consolidation of major pieces of work initiated in previous years under the Disability Action Plan , including:

Staff forum on disability – following its launch in March 2016, the forum will require support on an on-going basis

Work placements for people with a disability – it is anticipated that the scheme will grow further with additional placements offered in 2016/17.

Moreover, a move to remote, agile working to facilitate more face to face time with clients will be key to achieving efficiencies.

The graph below illustrates the increase in service demands in relation to requests for feedback on equality screenings and equality impact assessments over recent years. Please note that 2015/16 figures are as of the end of February 2016. Since 2014/15 demand has increased by 8.3%:

2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 2015/160

100

200

300

400

500

600

QueriesScreening Feedback Requests

5. Assurances to Customers

5.1. Customer Survey 2015/16

95% of respondents were satisfied/very satisfied with the quality of advice received from the Equality Unit;

90% of respondents were satisfied/very satisfied with the quality of customer service received from the Equality Unit.

5.2 Customer Relations

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Equality staff meet regularly with all customers and have a range of customer forums in place;

Equality scored 85% in the customer survey in the area of face-to-face facilitation.

5.3 Benchmarking/Value for Money

Throughout 2015/16, the Equality Unit has demonstrated the efficiencies achieved by partnership arrangements. These are reported as savings for clients achieved through economy of scale (no. of consultancy days saved per client due to collaboration with a target of 220 days for the year total).

6. Summary

Source 2016/17 £k 2016/17 %

Cash Releasing - -Productivity - 8.3%

Total - 8.3%

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Directorate: Directorate of Legal Services (DLS)

1. Overview of Service OfferingThe Directorate of Legal Services (DLS) provides a comprehensive range of Legal Services to all HSC Organisations. The services include the following:

Medical Negligence; Family Law; Employment law; General Litigation; Conveyancing; Procurement and contracts; Administrative law (ie, Judicial Review).

There is a time recording system in place, so that all activity carried out on behalf of clients is fully recorded: all clients are provided with a monthly printout detailing all time/activity carried out on their behalf, against each file. The performance of DLS is regularly monitored and reviewed by the Legal Senior Management Team.

2. StaffingDLS has a total of 120 staff of whom 54 are qualified Solicitors. The Directorate has five sections, broadly reflecting particular areas of law.

3. BudgetThe Directorate of Legal Services has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £4.90m:


Total £4.9m

4. 2016/17 Offering

4.1 Cash Releasing

DLS will deliver an efficiency saving of 1.0% through a reduction in costs. Savings of £49k will be achieved within current budgets.

4.2 Productivity

DLS will absorb an increase in demand for its services in 2016/17 of 1.5% by increasing productivity levels across its workforce. This efficiency will be delivered through increased activity which is measured by time recording, consistent with the current trend of increasing demand for its services, as outlined overleaf.

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Three Year Trend

Productivity Growth

2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 TotalGrowth

%

AnnualGrowth

%Total hours 74,352 80,599 82,049 10.4% 5.2%Increase in Hours 6,247 1,450% Increase 8.4% 1.8%

One Year Growth (part year)

Productivity Growth

2014/15(to 31 Jan)

2015/16(to 31 Jan)

TotalGrowth %

Total 68,411 74,191 8.4%Increase in Hours 5,780Total 8.4%

*Productivity calculations: 2011/12 - 71,447 hours2012/13 - 71,447 hours + 2.5% = 73,233 hours2013/14 - 73,233 hours + 3.0% = 75,430 hours2014/15 - 75,430 hours + 2.0% = 76,938 hours2015/16 - 76,938 hours + 1.5%= 78,092 hours

Any increase in demand over and above the 1.5% productivity gain will be escalated to client organisations as a matter of urgency and taken forward with a view to the provision of additional supporting resources. DLS will work closely with its customer organisations to manage and monitor demand.

4.3 Additional Information

DLS continues to make significant savings on Counsel’s fees and third party Solicitor’s costs. As at 31st January 2016:

Total savings on fees paid to Counsel year to date amounted to £480k; Total savings on third party costs year to date amounted to £1.9m.


5.1. Customer Survey 2015/16: 100% of respondents were satisfied with the friendliness and helpfulness of

DLS staff. 98% of respondents were satisfied with the quality of advice received from

DLS. 100% of respondents were satisfied with the professional image of DLS. 98% of respondents were satisfied with the high standard of service from

DLS.

5.2. Customer Forum(s):Legal staff meet regularly with all customers, including daily advice, regular case review meetings and an annual Legal Service Review Meeting.

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5.3. Benchmarking:Legal Services participate in a yearly benchmarking exercise which it is anticipated to take place by Q3 of 2016/17.

6. Summary

Source 2016/17 £k 2016/17+%Cash releasing 49 1.0

Productivity - 1.5Additional income - -

Total 49 2.5

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Directorate: Finance


The primary responsibilities of the Finance Directorate are to maintain appropriately robust systems of financial accounting, financial management and financial governance within the Organisation and to provide a range of accounting and financial services to HSC client bodies. These services include the provision of full Management Accounting and / or Financial Accounting services, including the production of annual Statutory Accounts.

Operational performance is continually monitored and challenged and all clients are issued with regular assurances on the adequacy, timeliness and completeness of this performance.

2. Staffing

There are 27 staff in the Finance Directorate who provide support services to BSO, such as, Financial Accounting, Management Accounting, Financial Governance, Banking and Capital Accounting as well as the provision of Financial and Management Accounting and Capital services to eight HSC client organisations.

3. Budget

The Finance Directorate has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £1.2m.


Total £1.2m

4. 2015/16 Offering

4.1 Productivity

4.1.1 Capital

The one remaining transactional area within the retained finance function is capital accounting. The capital accounting function has consistently absorbed year on year increases in both activity and throughput without recourse to clients for additional resources. These are summarised below.

Four year Trend

Description 2011/12 2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 Total Growth

Annual Growth

Asset Register activity (including additions and disposals)

48,752 59,379 65,618 73,022 50% 11%

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One–year growth (part year effect) estimate

Description 2014/15 2015/16 * Growth

Asset Register activity (including additions and disposals)

73,022 78,280 7%

* 2015/16 figure based on 9 months figure, projected for 12 months

4.2 Cash Releasing

The Finance Directorate has reduced staffing within the team linked to the residual retained funding of c£25k in respect of the Fujitsu contract. These savings will be applied directly to the SLAs of those HSC organisations providing this funding (HSC Trusts, HSCB and PHA). The Finance Directorate is further committed to releasing a further £8k in respect of reducing identified non-pay expenditure in a number of targeted areas, which equates to 1% savings against the SLAs with other HSC Organisations.

This reduction in the Finance Directorate’s operational cost base of £33k (representing an overall saving of 2.7%) will be recycled and returned to customers. Given the nature of the savings, which are partially applied against identified funding streams, as outlined above, the percentage savings cannot be applied evenly to all customers.


5.1 External Customer Survey 2015/16

100% of respondents receiving a full management accounting service rated the service as good or very good

100% of respondents receiving a full financial accounting and advisory service rated the service as good or very good

100% of respondents rated our timeliness in the provision of services as good or very good;

100% of respondents rated our levels of communication as good or very good;

100% of respondents rated our professionalism as good or very good;

6. Summary

Source 2015/16 £k 2015/16 %


Additional incomeTotal 33 3.8

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Directorate: Finance, Internal Audit


The primary role of Internal Audit is to provide the Accounting Officer, in an economical, efficient and timely manner, with an objective evaluation of, and opinion on, the overall adequacy and effectiveness of the organisation’s framework of governance, risk management and control. The Head of Internal Audit’s opinion is a key element of the framework of assurance that the Accounting Officer needs to inform the completion of the annual Governance Statement. The Head of Internal Audit’s overall opinion is based the delivery of an annual audit plan.

Including BSO itself, Internal Audit has 16 clients across HSC and also provides services to NIFRS and a further NDPB outside DHSSPS. Each client has a Service Level Agreement with BSO which includes the provision of a specific number of internal audit days each year. These annual audit days are allocated between individual risk based planned audit assignments, management time, follow up time and contingency (i.e., the annual audit plan).

Internal Audit report to clients monthly as part of the BSO Customer report and also quarterly at Audit Committees. The Head of Internal Audit formally provides audit assurance to clients in individual audit assignment reports and in her Annual Report.

The Internal Audit Forum meets twice a year to provide clients an opportunity to discuss and input into the quality and future direction of the service.

2. Staffing

The Internal Unit currently has 42 staff, across four offices, delivering an internal audit service to 18 organisations.

3. BudgetInternal Audit has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £1.5m

Pay £1.4m

Non Pay £0.1mTotal £1.5m

4. 2016/17 Offering


Internal Audit will provide 2.7% cash savings from its operating budget. The majority of these savings (£37k) will come from the salaries budget, with the closure of one Band 3 post and 0.25wte of a Band 5 post. The salaries budget reduction may also impact on Internal Audit’s ability to buy-in audit days to substitute for staff shortages if and when they occur. Over recent years Internal Audit has consistently bought in audit days to compensate for maternity leaves, delays in filling posts and staff sickness.

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An additional £3k will be saved from the goods and services budget, from the Department’s training and travel budgets.

Note: The cash releasing savings are at an overall Unit level and there will be variations in the breakdown of savings across the client base, with the majority of clients receiving 1% cash releasing savings.


5.1 Customer Reports

Internal Audit report to clients monthly as part of the BSO Customer report and also quarterly at Audit Committees. The Head of Internal Audit formally provides audit assurance to clients in individual audit assignment reports and in her Annual Report.

5.2 Customer Forums

The Internal Audit Forum meets twice a year to provide clients an opportunity to discuss and input into the quality and future direction of the service.

5.3 Benchmarking

During 2014/15, BSO Internal Audit participated in CIPFA Internal Audit Benchmarking Club. The results provided evidence of the good value for money and productivity of the service, against comparator organisations.

During 2015/16, BSO Internal Audit developed a benchmarking template to benchmark the service against NHS and HSE internal audit services. Results will be shared with clients, on conclusion of this work.

5.4 Customer Survey

Fifty five people responded to the BSO Internal Audit Customer Survey conducted in the Autumn 2015. Key results of the survey are as follows:

Approximately 90% of respondents agreed that the internal audit plan is focused on the risks of their organisation;

Approximately 90% of respondents strongly agreed or tended to agree that internal audit adds value to their organisation;

Approximately 75% of respondents rated the overall service provided by Internal Audit as good or very good;

Approximately 85% of respondents described the overall service from internal audit as good or very good.

6. Summary

Source 2016/17 £k 2016/17 %Cash releasing 40 2.7

Productivity - -Additional income - -

Total 40 2.7

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Directorate: Human Resources and Corporate Services


The Human Resources and Corporate Service Directorate provides a range of HR services to HSC client bodies and Corporate Services to BSO. In 2016/15 Corporate Services may also be provide to other ALBs. These services encompass the full range of HR services.

Operational performance is continually monitored and challenged and all clients are provided with relevant information in regard to performance of the SLA and the value for money of the service offering. Quarterly meetings are held with customers on a planned basis and these are augmented with ad-hoc discussion on organisation specific issues

The Administrative Services department provides a range of administrative support services including the coordination of the facilities management contract for the BSO, management of the Estate and Information Governance within BSO. This may extend to other organisations in 2016/17.

2. Staffing

The HRCS Directorate staffing consists of 18 staff in Human Resources and 4 staff in Corporate Services. Within the budget there are also three employees who do not provide services to BSO or our customers and are funded directly by Trusts or DHSSPS.

3. Budget

Total HRCS operating budget for 2015/16 is £2.7m. The Human Resources Department has an operating budget of £1.0m, comprised as follows:

Pay £0.9Non Pay £0.1

Total £1.0

The Corporate Service Directorate has an operating budget for 2015/16 of £1.7m (including a number of corporate budgets for utilities, etc.) comprised as follows:

Pay £0.1Goods and Services £1.6

Total £1.7

4. 2015/16 Offering

4.1 Cash releasing

4.1.1. Administration Services

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There are no opportunities for a reduction in the Admin Services payroll budget giving the increasing demands surrounding information management and the current small size of this team.

The goods and services budget reflects a number of corporate expenditure items not least in regard to utilities, rates and postage, etc. These are all subject to detailed scrutiny and savings identified. In addition savings made throughout this year through energy efficiencies will continue to be achieved throughout 2016/17.

It is proposed that as a result of the efficiencies and new contracts put in place last year that there would be a savings of £108,000 in regard to services such as telephony, postage and utilities. This saving will be applied to HSC Trusts SLA providing legacy Corporate Services funding.

It is also planned to introduce a wider range of shared corporate services across a number of organisations with effect from 01 July 2016.

4.1.2 Human Resources

The HR Directorate will continue to monitor other goods and services expenditure within its control to ensure effective use of resources.

4.2 Productivity

The HR Directorate provides a range of services to HSC client organisations. Since BSO’s incorporation in April 2009, the Directorate has experienced consistent, significant growth in volumes of activity across a range of activities both within BSO and on behalf of its client base, as summarised below:

Activity 09/10 10/11 11/12 12/13

13/14 14/15 15/16 @jan 16

Annual %

ChangeHeadcount 1,916 2,069 2,065 2,40

72,668 2937 2884 -1.9

New starts 366 181 628 527 483 546 281 -51Leavers n/a** 202 194 298 300 314 256 -19

The forthcoming year will see a number of significant HR initiatives:

The consolidation and the pursuit of benefit realisation arising from HRPTS will require significant work involving both HR and managerial staff;

The challenges arising from the workforce implications of the 2016/17 financial scenario;

There is an expectation that there will be an increasing demand for re-evaluations of bandings across a number of customers which will require significant managerial time and organisational investment;

Customers are already seeking additional input on strategic issues including the development of learning and development plans particularly for PHA and HSCB, which will require a higher level of time spent by HR staff;

An increasing contribution from senior HR staff and the Information team is also expected as a result of changes arising from ministerial announcements regarding HSC reform;

A developing and increased demand for involvement of senior HR staff in workplace relationship issues.

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4.3 Additional Income Generation

Subject to SMT agreement consideration will be given to the development of Business cases for new services to generate additional funds.


5.1 Customer Survey 2015/16 (2014/15 previous figures in brackets)

68% (59%) of respondents rated the overall service received from HRCS as either good / very good;

66% (55%) of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the time taken to respond to queries;

80% (82%) of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the quality of advice received from HRCS.

5.2 Customer Forum(s)

HR hold regular customer forums with a range of customers.

5.3 Benchmarking

HR participates in regular benchmarking exercises. These results are currently being finalised but can be included if necessary

6. Summary

6.1 Human Resources

Source 2016/17£k

2016/17%

Cash releasing - -Productivity - 2%

Total - 2%

6.2 Corporate Services

Source 2016/17£k

2016/17%

Cash releasing 108 6.4Productivity - -

Total 108 6.4

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Directorate: HSC Leadership Centre


The HSC Leadership Centre provides Leadership, Management and Organisation Development support across the HSC. Although the main element of its workload emanates from within HSC, it also provides a service for the private, voluntary and community sectors.

2. Staffing

The Leadership Centre employs 39 staff comprising of Training Consultants, IT Consultants and administration/support staff.

3. Budget

The HSC Leadership Centre had an operating budget for 2015/16 of £2.8m.


Total £2.8m

4. 2016/17 Offering

4.1 Cash Releasing

During the 2015/16 year the Leadership Centre intends to offer clients a cash releasing saving of 1.5% against the element of their contracts. This will not relate to any SLA income (such as core funding) which does not relate to service delivery (SLA days).

4.2 Productivity

The Leadership Centre contracts with clients through Service Level Agreements which are agreed annually. The agreements are monitored and reported on, on a monthly basis.

The Leadership Centre is proposing an increase of 1% in productivity in the consultancy days available to organisations in 2015/16.

4.3 Additional Income Generation

The HSC Leadership Centre generates additional income through the sub-rental of office space. Income will also be generated through the residual costs for a senior leadership programme for social workers. This year the Leadership Centre worked with the NI Hospice and this relationship will continue into 2016/17. Consultants will be allocated individual OFE targets to ensure that our targets are met.


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Clients have a named a contact at the Leadership Centre and all queries relating to content or quality are dealt with immediately. Where there is an organisational issue that arises, it is escalated to the Senior Management Team for action.

Customer Forum(s)

Leadership Centre staff meet regularly with customers and clients through the Service Level Agreement meetings. All clients have a named SLA Co-ordinator

There are meetings with CEOs and the Head of Centre on a twice-yearly basis to ensure that the Leadership Centre is meeting client expectations.

Leadership Centre Council

Clients are represented on the Council of the Leadership Centre.

5.4 Customer Survey Results 91% of respondents rated the overall service received from HRCS as either

good / very good; 87% of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the time taken to

respond to queries; 91% (82%) of respondents were either satisfied/very satisfied with the quality

of advice received from HRCS.

5. Summary

Source 2016/17 £k 2016/17 %



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Directorate: HSC Clinical Education Centre


The HSC Clinical Education Centre (CEC) exists to provide In-Service Education to Nurses, Midwives and Allied Health Professionals employed by its core clients which include five Health and Social Care Trusts, NI Hospice and Southern Area Hospice. In addition, the Centre also provides consultancy to the voluntary, community and independent sectors and other statutory organisations.

2. Locations and Staffing

The CEC operates from four conveniently located facilities across Northern Ireland namely Clady (Knockbracken Healthcare Park), Craigavon, Fern House (Antrim Area Hospital) and Altnagelvin. The CEC’s multidisciplinary workforce includes Nurse and Midwife Education Consultants, Allied Health Professionals, Administrative and Clerical staff, Librarian and Technical Officer.

3. Service Level Agreement

The DHSSPS commissions the CEC to provide In-Service education for nursing, midwifery and allied health professions staff through a regional Service Level Agreement (SLA).

In respect of nursing and midwifery each Trust has access to an annual allocation within the SLA. This along with effective communication, liaison and partnership working between the CEC and the Trusts helps to facilitate an effective distribution of education delivery across the region.

The DHSSPS annually commissions the CEC through a regional Service Level Agreement, to provide in-service education to AHP staff employed within HSC Trusts.

4. Budget

The CEC’s has an operating budget of £3.5m for 2015/16, comprised as follows:


Total £3.5m

5. 2016/17 Offering

5.1 Productivity

The CEC monitors and manages performance of both of the regional SLAs on a monthly basis. A unique model of collaboration, co-ordination and liaison enables the CEC to respond effectively and in a timely way to meet the needs of service. The Head of CEC, Assistant Heads and Senior Education Managers

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with responsibility for SLA co-ordination are committed to ensuring that customers receive maximum benefit in terms of both quality and productivity and to this end formal and informal processes and arrangements are actively maintained.

By 31 March 2015 the Nursing and Midwifery Unit, had surpassed its target of 100% achievement against the SLA by an additional 6%, rendering an overall total of 106% within the budget allocation. The AHP Unit by 31 March 2015 also exceeded its target of 100% of the SLA, in this instance by 1% yielding an overall total of 101% within the budget allocation. At the time of preparing this service offering the CEC anticipates the full (100%) achievement of both of its SLA targets for the period 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016.


6.1 The annual survey of our customers indicated that:

100% of those responding rated the overall service from HSC CEC as either very good or good;

88% of those responding indicated they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of HSC CEC customer service;

96% of those responding said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of advice provided by HSC CEC.

6.2 Customer Forum(s):

CEC staff meets regularly with the customers and clients through the SLA meetings.

6.3 Quality Assurance

Fundamental to the delivery of high quality in-service education is the provision of programmes and learning activities which are:

Responsive to and reflective of clients’ needs; Educationally sound; Informed by best available evidence; Delivered by skilled teaching staff; Subjected to evaluation; and The CEC’s quality assurance framework sets out the systems, processes

and arrangements which are embedded to meet this requirement.

It is also relevant to note that a number of nursing and midwifery programmes are delivered under a licencing/approval agreement. This means that such programmes delivered by the CEC must meet the requirements of the licence/approving body and are advertised as such via the website.

A number of programmes delivered via the AHP Unit, are accredited and/or endorsed by the education provider/Professional Body, These include for example; a programme for Speech and Language Therapists accredited by the HANEN Society; IV Cannulation for Radiographers is endorsed by the Society of Radiographers (SOR) and the Bobath programme for Physiotherapists and

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Occupational Therapists which is accredited by the British Bobath Tutors Association.

6.4 Influencing and shaping the future needs

The CEC actively seeks to support the development of the nursing, midwifery and AHP workforce by influencing and shaping strategic direction and intent. Key in this regard is CEC’s presence and contribution to a range of regional fora including for example:

Central Nursing and Midwifery Advisory Committee and its various sub groups;

Regional Professional Fora for AHPs; Strategic Workforce Development Group for AHPs; Various working groups and committees related to education and learning

which are hosted and managed by the DHSSPS, PHA and HSCB; and Various project/work-stream groups hosted and managed by the Northern

Ireland Practice Education Council for Nursing and Midwifery (NIPEC).

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Directorate: Shared Services


The BSO Shared Services provides defined corporate services to all HSC organisations for:

Accounts Payable; Accounts Receivable; Payroll, Travel and Subsistence; and Recruitment and Selection.

In addition to the above specialist shared services centres, BSO Shared Services also provides common system and data administration operations for the Finance Procurement and Logistics (FPL) and the HR Payroll Travel and Subsistence (HRPTS) systems.

1.1 Accounts Payable

The Accounts Payable Shared Services Centre (SSC) is based in Greenmount House, Ballymena and from December 2014 has full responsibility for managing the payments function for all of HSC.

The Accounts Payable SSC processes all supplier invoices and payments arising from HSC Organisations’ procurement activities as well as the processing of supplier invoices and payments raised without Purchase Orders.

Services provided by Accounts Payables include:

Operational Accounts Payable Service; calculate and reconcile inter-indebtedness; Responsible for the reconciliation of transactions within the following control

accounts:

- Trade Creditors;- Trade Debtors;- VAT;- Payroll & deductions;- Prepayment.

Responsible for the reconciliation of bank accounts; Provision of information to support annual accounts; Response to AQ/FOI; Customer statement reconciliation; Prompt payment reporting compliance; Emergency manual payment; Patient travel through cheques; Processing of payments with Construction Industry Tax Scheme deductions; Late payment interest; Month end creditors/accruals/prepayments; NFI- Annual return; Payments to nursing/ residential homes; Legal/medical legal payments.

1.2 Accounts Receivable

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The Accounts Receivable Shared Services Centre is based in T&F Hospital, Omagh managing the operational aspects of the accounts receivable services for the HSC.

Accounts Receivable Shared Services (SS) processes all Customer, Product and Invoice requests or amendments which are correctly submitted and authorised by HSC Organisation. The SSC is responsible for the production and despatch of all invoices, including supporting documentation. In the majority of cases, SS will be the first and only point of contact with customers who may have an invoice query. The exception to this process will be where there is a prior agreement with an Organisation to print out and send invoices locally, where confidential patient information needs to be attached to invoices.

Full debtors’ collection and follow up procedures are also the responsibility of SS.

Services provided by Accounts Receivables include:

Response to AQ/FOI; Responsibility for the maintenance of the customer file, together with WGA

categorisation; Processing invoice requests together with the production and transmission

of invoices; Processing credit note requests together with their production and

transmission; Responsible for operating the agreed credit control policy; Cheque/cash receipting and allocation of payments received in SSC; Responsible for drawdowns from DHSSPS to maintain cash balances used

to meet supplier and payroll payments; Preparation and submission of the monthly VAT returns for each HSC

Organisation; Interfacing third party data for invoicing; Period/year end processing close down; Customer enquiries; Provision of information to support annual accounts; Responsibility to calculate and reconcile inter-indebtedness; Responsible for the reconciliation of transactions within the following control

accounts:- Trade Creditors;- Trade Debtors;- VAT; and- Payroll & deductions.

Responsible for all Prepayments.

1.3 Payroll, Travel and Subsistence

The Payroll Shared Services Centre is based in College Street, Belfast managing the operational aspects of the Payroll, Travel and Subsistence services for the HSC.

The Payroll Shared Service Centre (PSCC) is responsible for the end to end processing of standing employee and pay data to produce the employee’s pay

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and ensure that the appropriate financial information has been updated within the organisations accounts. The Payroll Shared Service Centre processes monthly, fortnightly and weekly payrolls, depending upon the organisational needs. In addition to standard processing, the PSSC will also complete a full year end process to produce tax documents such as the P60 and the P11d and support any annual account activity as required by HSC Employers.

In addition to standard periodic processing, the PSSC also produces off cycle payments to enable payment to employees outside of the normal processing timeframes. The processes for these off cycle payments have not yet been finalised. Once employees have access via self-service to their own employee record, it is envisaged that they will be able to update on-line any changes to their personal details i.e. name, address, bank details etc.

Shared services will also manage all travel and subsistence claims from submission of claim to payment via payroll.

1.4 Recruitment & Selection

The Recruitment & Selection Shared Services Centre is based in St Luke’s Hospital, Armagh.

Recruitment & Selection (R&S) Shared Services manage the recruitment process from approval/authorisation of a post to the issue of the employee contract and creation of the new employee record on the HR system. The Recruitment & Selection Shared Service lead and support recruitment and selection activities across all Health and Social Care organisations and includes activities such as:

Processing all approved E-Requisitions; Proactively managing the creation/maintenance and usage of

Regional/Trust Wide Waiting lists/Reserve lists; Preparation, tracking and management of advertising activities in line with

agreed protocols; Management of all HSC job applications received; Management and facilitation of all shortlisting activities; Management and facilitation of the full range of selection processes; Delivering all pre-employment check activities in line with agreed protocols

& procedures including escalation management; Managing the offer process and associated activities; Ensuring all R&S inputs to FOI/DP/Applicant Feedback/Queries &

Complaints are provided on time and in line with guidelines; Delivering against SLAs and standards.

1.5 Business Services Team

The common system and data administration operations provided by Business Services Team (BST) are closely aligned with the activities of other BSO support functions based in Belfast including BSO Information Technology Services and BSO Customer Care directorate.

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Business Services Team (BST) also provides Supplier Master Data Management services including supplier creation and amendments as well as a dedicated Supplier Enquiry Helpdesk.

2. Staffing

BSO Shared Services is still in transition with completion for each SSC as follows:

Accounts Payable has been fully established since October 2014; Accounts Receivable has been fully established since May 2014; Payroll has been fully established since January 2015; and Recruitment & Selection scheduled to be fully established by August 2016

As of March 2016, the four SSCs comprised of 312 WTE with 14 WTE in the Business Support Team. The target of 306 WTEs is planned to be achieved by October 2016.

The table below outlines the current staffing compliment, start-up staffing and final target:

Planned WTEs(as of Mar 2016) Start-up Target

(for Oct 2016)Income 37 47 37Payments 106 124 79Payroll 128 128 107Recruitment 41 86 65Business Services 14 32 15SSC Mgmt 3 3 3Totals 329 420 306

3. Budget

BSO and the HSC Trusts/Organisations have an agreed methodology and model for shared services charging arrangements which includes staffing, systems, accommodation and other relevant costs. Charging in 2016-17 will be based on volumetric information reflecting shared services costs and transactional history.

FY16-17

R & S£'000

Payments£'000

Income£'000

Payroll£'000

BST£’000

SS Mgmt & Admin

Total£'000

Pay 1,500 2,085 1,049 2,997 514 101 8,246Non-Pay 99 276 108 222 8 81 794

Total 1,599 2,361 1,157 3,219 522 182 9,040

4. 2016/17 Offering1.

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2.3.4.

4.1 Cash releasing

As highlighted at BRP Programme Board and BSTP Programme Board BSO had targeted a reduction in of 114 WTEs in FY15-16. These plans were entirely contingent upon a range of actions within both BSO and HSC Trusts. However, a number of these actions are still to be fully implemented and as such 47 of the planned reduction will be made in the first 6 months of FY16-17, a reduction of 27 WTE in Accounts Payable (reduction planned by August 2016) and 21 in Payroll (reduction planned by October 2016).

The total indicative Shared Services costs for 2016/17 of £9.0m are allocated to each HSC Trust and Regional Organisation using a number of cost drivers.

The anticipated savings in respect of Account Receivable, Accounts Payable and Payroll from 2015/16 to 2016/17 is £714k equating to 8.9% of estimated expenditure during 2015/16 in these three areas. Recruitment and Selection has not been included in these figures as this has not yet been fully rolled out to all customers and at steady state operationally.

4.2 Productivity

Shared Services is fully established in three of the four Shared Service Centres providing a range of services to HSC Trusts and organisations:

4.2.1 Accounts Payable & Accounts Receivable

BSO & Regional Organisations NHSCT NIBTS WHSCT BHSCT NIAS SEHSCT SHSCT NIMDTA

4.2.2 Payroll, Travel & Subsistence

BSO & Regional Organisations NHSCT NIBTS WHSCT BHSCT NIAS SEHSCT SHSCT NIMDTA

4.2.3 Recruitment & Selection

BSO & Regional Organisations NHSCT SHSCT SEHSCT BHSCT NIAS

Please Note: WHSCT, NIMDTA & NIBTS scheduled to transition by August 2016.

4.2.4 Shared Service Activity

Since the launch of the various centres there has been a significant growth in volumes of activity as summarised overleaf.

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Shared ServiceCentres

Activity Estimate for FY15-16

Accounts Payable

No of invoices paid 1.5m

Total value of invoices paid £3,000m

Accounts Receivable

Number of invoices raised 70k

Total number of credit notes raised

3,000

PayrollTotal pays issued 1.6m

Average pays per month 110,000

Recruitment No. of requisitions processed 6,000

Business Services

Team

Number of supplier creations 20k

Number of supplier amendments

20k

Number of INFRAs resolved 1k


4.3.1 Quarterly Assurance Reporting

BSO has commenced producing quarterly Assurance reports to all Shared Services customers. The reports include the following sections:

- Details of when performance against KPIs have not been met in the reporting period;

- Latest position on financial position (actual vs planned);

- Governance Update: Progress against audit recommendations; and

- Update on resourcing.

4.3.2 Customer Forum(s)

Shared Services has commenced regular customer forums from January 2014. There are monthly customer forums for BHSCT, NHSCT, WHSCT, SEHSCT, SHSCT & NIAS/NIMDTA and a joint quarterly forum with BSO and Regional Organisations.

4.3.3 Benchmarking

The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) plan to benchmark Payroll, Payment and Income in June 2016.

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5. SummarySource 2016/17 £k 2016/17 %

Cash releasing 714 8.9%Productivity - -

Additional income - -Total 714 8.9%

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£'000 % £'000 % £'000 % £'000 % £'000 %OPERATIONSPALS 174 1.5% 0 0.0% 174 1.5% n/a 1.8% 174 3.3%FPS 308 5.0% 0 0.0% 308 5.0% n/a 0.0% 308 5.0%PENSIONS 0 0.0% 0 0.0% 0 0.0% n/a 2.6% 0 2.6%CF&P 35 2.9% 0 0.0% 35 2.9% n/a 0.7% 35 3.6%CC&PORECNI 32 16.0% 0 0.0% 32 16.0% n/a 0.0% 32 16.0%CR&SI 17 8.5% 0 0.0% 17 8.5% n/a 0.0% 17 8.5%EQUALITY 0 0.0% 0 0.0% 0 0.0% n/a 8.3% 0 8.3%ITS 102 1.5% 0 0.0% 102 1.5% n/a 0.0% 102 1.5%OTHER SERVICE AREAS / DIRECTORATESDLS 49 1.0% 0 0.0% 49 1.0% n/a 1.5% 49 2.5%FINANCE 33 2.8% 0 0.0% 33 2.8% n/a 1.0% 33 3.8%INTERNAL AUDIT 40 2.7% 0 0.0% 40 2.7% n/a 0.0% 40 2.7%HR 0 0.0% 0 0.0% 0 0.0% n/a 2.0% 0 2.0%CS 108 6.4% 0 0.0% 108 6.4% n/a 0.0% 108 6.4%HSC LC 15 1.5% 0 0.0% 15 1.5% n/a 1.0% 15 2.5%CEC 0 0.0% 0 0.0% 0 0.0% n/a 0.0% 0 0.0%SHARED SERVICES (AR/AP/Payroll) 714 8.9% 0 0.0% 714 8.9% n/a 0.0% 714 8.9%TOTAL 1,627 3.2% - 0.0% 1,627 3.2% 0.8% 1,627 4.0%

ANNEX 1 - PLANNED 2016/17 EFFICIENCIES

CASH RELEASING INCOME TOTAL CASH REL PRODUCTIVITY TOTAL EFFICIENCY

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