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The Sector Skills Council for UK Healthcare – Skills for Health has recently published the results of pilot work it was undertaking over a year with seven NHS Trusts on a ‘skills passport’.

The system, built by Skillsprofile based on work it has done withing other industries, allows workers to create an online record of their skills, qualifications and experience, verified by qualified line managers, enabling prospective or existing employers to save duplicating training where it is not needed – especially stautory mandatory training if staff move between employers.

Skills for Health endorsed the work delivered by the organisations, stressing the potential to reduce administrative costs associated with taking on new staff and a range of other benefits for employers and employees.

David Foster, Deputy Chief Nursing Officer for England has spoken favourably about the pilot, suggesting it had ” …confirmed the case for a skills passport, … also highlighted a range of potential additional benefits for employers, health workers throughout the UK, universities and, most importantly, those who use health services. But is this initiative too late?

There is certainly a convincing arguement to be made for effectively recording and recognising the training and skills of the employees that move between NHS employers. The full evaluation report on the pilot highlights some potentially valuable benefits identified in interviews with stakeholders, including -

• Reduction in the duplication of training
• Cost and time saving
• Verification overcomes any fraudulent professionals entering the profession
• Reminders for mandatory training and registration to professional bodies
• Potential to use as a marketing tool and recruitment function
• Potential for Training Providers to use as an APEL tool (Accreditation of Prior (Experiential) Learning)

Some of the other benefits attributed to the system, including reductions in recruitment cycles and flexible working between healthcare organisations – based simply on up to date skills profiles – look a little inflated.

Ignoring these areas though, it seems obvious the NHS would look to capitalise on these opportunities, so why might it be too late?

These same benefit formed part of the guiding vision for the deployment of the Talent Management, Self Service and Inter-Authority Transfer tools within the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) system – the national NHS HR and Payroll solution. There are certainly overlaps between the skills passport solution and the existing ORACLE platform provided by McKesson.

While Skills for Health now intends to explore the possibility of “a national roll out”, the full report also includes some revealing information on the experience of the pilots .

• Usage of the system by pilot users has been low - only 14% have attempted to input any data, with many of these being the project leads in each pilot site.
• While the pilot covered 325 registered members and 20 verifier accounts, only 38 people had input skills on the system – only 13 skills had been verified.
• Barriers to usage included lack of time, security concerns, computer literacy and confidence, access to hardware and concerns over the volumes of data input needed for some individuals.
• The report noted that employees most likely to move on were those showing most motivation to complete the passport.

While these experiences would be familiar in the early days of many new systems, there are more fundamental challenges to the widespread introduction of the system. In the report, Skills for Health considered the following areas would need to be addressed -

• Some kind of “… mandating from the Department of Health and Chief Nursing Officers” would be required to strengthen employee engagement,
• Full adoption of employers at a local or national level and agreement of the standardisation of mandatory training and what that comprises would be needed,
• Links between the Skills Passport and other HR and learning management systems in place such as ESR, eKSF, OLM plus other potential passports that exist, particularly in the Training Provider arena.

Even in “normal times”, with NHS organisations facing a relatively stable environment, all of these issues would be incredibly difficult to address and, until the last point was addressed, the resources and capacity needed to deploy tools successfully might simply not exist in most NHS organisations. If this wasnt difficult enough, the new administration seems unlikely to endorse or resource any common national IT platform – the days of such solutions are over … for now at least.

While the report was completed in March 2010, publishing its results in August finds the NHS reeling under the impact of the NHS White paper – creating a new environment for healthcare providers, one which embraces increasing diversity in suppliers greater competition between organisations for healthcare contracts with less scope for common solutions and greater potential for competition over the skilled workforce.

While many of the benefits targeted by the Skills Passport are undeiably real, in this new environment, the possibility the NHS will be able to deliver the joined-up cooperation, planning and deployment effort required to realise those benefits looks very slim.