New payroll app saves 330 hours a month

A new app that enables NHS staff to view and interrogate their payslips on any mobile device is helping to save the NHS around 333 hours every month.

The MySBSPay app, launched by NHS Shared Business Services at the end of last year, reduces the number of telephone payroll queries from NHS employees, allowing employees their pay information in a more convenient and understandable format, including the facility to ask common pay-related questions using modern Chatbot technology.

With almost 400,000 NHS staff paid via the NHS SBS payroll service, which is used by around 90 NHS organisations around the country, the app has now been downloaded over 40,000 times and has already led to hundreds of NHS workforce hours being saved for more valuable activity, such as frontline patient care.

Figures for the three months August to October 2018 show that the NHS SBS payroll service desk dealt with an average of 12,808 queries a month from NHS employees. Comparitively, between November 2018 and January 2019, the total number of cases was down significantly to an average of 9,474 per month - a 26 per cent decrease. With an average case taking approximately six minutes to resolve, this equates to a saving of around 333 staff hours every month - the equivalent of 48 working days across the NHS.

David Morris, NHS SBS managing director, said: "The MySBSPay App is a perfect example of how innovative technology can be used to give the NHS workforce the tools to be more effective. The NHS Long Term Plan talks about removing wasted time and irritating tasks so that staff are able to focus on patient care. And this is exactly what we are doing in the back office. Listening to what NHS hospitals need and developing digital ways of working that lessen the admin burden on their employees.

"With NHS trusts across the country struggling to recruit and retain enough staff to meet demand, it has never been more important to ensure that the current NHS workforce is working efficiently and on high value tasks. To see that our App has had such a huge impact in a relatively short period of time shows how important it can become for the NHS in future. As more NHS employees continue to download and use MySBSPayto manage their pay information, the expectation is that many more hundreds of hours can be saved every month - freeing up NHS staff to concentrate more of their time where it really matters and on what makes the biggest difference to patients."