Section 172 Statement

The Directors take a long term and ethical approach to decision making for the benefit of the organisation, its employees, customers and those organisations dependent on its effective governance, including suppliers.

The company has one shareholder, the Department for Health and Social Care.  The objectives of the shareholder are therefore central to the decision-making of the business and this has been particularly evident during the pandemic when the business has played a key role in many of the responses to the pandemic.

The best interests of the shareholder typically align with the best interests of our customers, primarily NHS Trusts, flexible workers who work primarily in NHS Trusts and company employees who support the deployment of those flexible workers and provide services to those NHS Trusts.

Our responsibilities to our stakeholders are regularly reviewed at monthly departmental performance meetings and board meetings. Existing services and opportunities are considered in the context of their likelihood to contribute to the success and sustainability of the business, along with the benefits that they will bring to our shareholder, employees and customers.  The company recognises that, because of its ownership structure, it has an important role to play in maximising the benefit that it can bring to its NHS Trust customers and therefore the wider community.

 

Supporting long term decision-making

Annual Strategic Plans and long-term business transformation projects, with their associated business cases, are submitted to the board for review and approval, taking into account benefit realisation for stakeholders, risk and other longer term business impacts.

 

Reviewing risk

There is an embedded culture of risk management within the business and a Corporate Risk Register is reviewed on a monthly cycle. There is an active Business Continuity planning function and this is maintained throughout the year.  This is aligned with a command structure to quickly adapt to any critical changes in the organisation’s operational environment.

 

Stakeholder accountability

We use regular surveys and workshops to review the organisation’s performance in terms of perception and feedback from our employees, suppliers and customers. The organisation is working towards accreditation with the Institute of Customer Service (ICS).  If our results reach the benchmark of 70% satisfaction both with our internal teams and external customers along with a few other factors, we will look to apply for assessment for accreditation.

Through this external party we objectively assess and enhance our customer satisfaction offering by measuring how the organisation performs in line with our mission to become a truly customer centric organisation. This includes a satisfaction score for each stakeholder group which includes, corporate employees, Bank Members, Trust Users and our recruitment agency partners. There are also regular client board strategy workshops to ensure key decision makers from our clients can contribute to our product development and influence mutually beneficial service outcomes.

 

Employee Feedback

Utilising our feedback and engagement tool (My Engagement powered by Peakon) we have seen an increase in engagement scores from 7.3 to 7.7 over the last 12 months, which is an excellent uplift. Our aggregated participation rate also increased to 85%, which is 3% above benchmark, and indicates that our employees are wholly engaged in providing their anonymous feedback.  Managers are increasingly using the tool to create action plans with their teams and responding to individual feedback on a monthly basis.

 

Supplier engagement

Suppliers are managed at a Director level within the business to ensure business relationships are maintained and provide open channels of communication. A robust scheme of delegation is in use to ensure authorisation through the procurement process with sign off by appropriate levels of management. Ultimately, beyond agreed spend thresholds, sign off is escalated to the Board. Furthermore, as a staffing organisation, involvement with key suppliers is essential for supply chain management. This is particularly the case with partner recruitment agencies, in line with client vendor management agreements, as well as operationally significant partners such as payrolling, rostering and technology suppliers. NHSP has developed a program for strategic and tactical suppliers. At the end of FY22/23 we had analysed and segmented over 80% of spend with over 50 suppliers identified as Tier 1 or Tier 2 and covered by the strategic management framework also implemented in the last year.

 

Community and the environment

In March and April 2022, NHS Professionals formally opened our Manchester and Leeds offices to provide a working environment for those employees working outside the south of England. In addition to these northern hubs, all corporate employees have access to regional serviced office ‘hubs’ and continue to have the facility to use video calls, a practice which is encouraged in order to reduce travel. The organisation champions flexible working and provides the appropriate equipment such as laptops, headsets, and company mobiles for its employees to help facilitate this way of working.  This has been popular with staff and well utilised during the Covid-19 pandemic enabling seamless service delivery to our Clients.

On the theme of sustainability, further to our landmark achievement of ISO14001 accreditation in FY21/22, the period end of FY22/23 saw the launch of NHSP For Good, an initiative focused entirely on ESG and sustainability and lead by the Head of ESG, a role created in FY22/23. H1 FY23/24 will see the launch of our ESG Committee formed of 12 colleagues from across the organisation, the launch of a new sustainability app for use by all employees, the formal launch of an ESG Policy document, and the first formal delivery of social value recorded in accordance with the recognised standards of the Social Value Portal.

 

Charity

The company has not made any charitable donations during the year.  We have the Health and Wellbeing hub, regular member webinars as well as internal training and webinars/inclusive meetings via the Staff Support Network. We have dedicated content for Pride, Black History Month, other key dates and religious holidays.

 

Clinical Governance

For our flexible workers and client Trusts, there is a robust clinical governance and feedback infrastructure to ensure compliance with the professional standards relevant to clinical practice. We work closely with our clients to identify opportunities for improvement and shared learning. This can often lead to identifying opportunities for Bank Member education and training. To further support this we hope to implement a state-of-the-art Learning Management System to support Bank Member training and development.

 

Conduct Governance

Training in data protection, cyber security, equality and diversity, fraud, bribery and corruption, unconscious bias and environmental awareness continues to be mandatory for all new hires, and refreshed annually for all employees, with completion numbers reported monthly.  In addition, our Code of Conduct outlines the responsibilities of Line Managers and Employees and sets out the standards of conduct expected from all our corporate employees. Our Bank Member Employee Services team supports our bank members and clients in addressing any issues of performance, in line with our Bank Member Code of Behaviour.

 

International Nursing Recruitment

To support the aim of NHSE/I to recruit internationally qualified nurses to fill the nursing workforce gap we have continued to recruit at scale through our international recruitment programme. We are also recruiting into non nursing roles to support the broader workforce challenge.