NHS England has enlisted further support in moving the development of the NHS digital staff passport (DSP) towards its public beta phase.
It has published the award notice for a new interim contract with SiteKit Applications as a technical services supplier for the project. It came into effect in November and will run until August with a value just short of £2 million.
The notice states that the reason is “that the DSP is not stable enough and we do not have enough detailed requirements ready to go out for mini-competition tender for the public beta phase”.
It does not state when the public beta will begin, although a previously published timeline for the project has set a target for July of this year.
This follows an NHS England announcement in December that a group of four NHS trusts had registered for the first wave of pilot deployments of the passport. George Eliot Hospital, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire, Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals and Sheffield Teaching Hospital will take a small scale, incremental approach to implementation and provide feedback from improvements.
Second wave
NHS England called on more trusts to register for a second wave of pilots.
The plan for a DSP to replace the interim version used during the Covid-19 pandemic was made public in 2021. It is aimed at enabling staff to move more easily between different NHS employers.
It is planned that employees will be able to carry a verified record of their clearance on a smartphone app. This would include name, date of birth, national insurance number, a photograph, professional registration details, basic details on employment checks, basic details of current employment and a confirmation of occupational health clearance.
SiteKit applications has already been working on the project with earlier contracts to work on the staff experience and the NHS organisations’ portal.
