Staffing & Agency Workers WTE Breakdown since April 2019
Reference: 24-25222
Date response sent: 18/09/2024
Details of enquiry
- For each month since April 2019,
a. the headcount,
b. established Whole Time Equivalent,
c. contracted WTE
d. actual worked WTE
relating to each staff group and grade (eg. AfC B7 Nurses) covered by Agenda for Change, Very Senior Manager (VSM) and Medical or Dental Contracts.
- Please also include actual worked WTE for agency staff where this is included in your system. These groups should align with your general ledger / ESR expense codes.
Response sent
It may help to understand our responses below within the context of its field of operation. The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist mental health Trust, and not a traditional hospital.
We provide outpatient, and mainly psychological, services. We do not provide acute services, nor inpatient patient services, nor detention facilities, and do not have an A&E department.
For each month since April 2019, and relating to each staff group and grade (eg. AfC B7 Nurses) covered by Agenda for Change, Very Senior Manager (VSM) and Medical or Dental Contracts.
1.
a. the headcount,
b. established Whole Time Equivalent,
c. contracted WTE
d. actual worked WTE
Items 1 a-b-c
Please find attached two csv files showing which have been extracted from our ESR system for the period April 2019 to July 2024
a. Att1 24-25222 Monthly Staff in Post, covers above-listed items 1a, 1b, and 1c
Item 1d
For item d. above we have interpreted actual worked WTE as hours being available to work and therefore as we would seek to discount sickness absence we have attached a report, in similar format to that supplied above for item 1a, 1b, and 1c, which shows staff sickness over the same period. We have not discounted absence for annual leave as this is a contractual entitlement and covered by salaried pay.
a. Att2 24-25222 Monthly Staff Absence, covers recorded sickness absence of staff for the period specified.
b. Please also include actual worked WTE for agency staff where this is included in your system. These groups should align with your general ledger / ESR expense codes.
The Trust does not hold its data in this way, and we are refusing this question under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, on cost grounds because we estimate that compliance with your request will exceed the “appropriate limit”. This is £450 which is equivalent to 18 hours at £25 per hour. The per hour figure is set by Regulations rather than actual salary paid to any officers handling requests. The appropriate limit includes the time it would take the Trust to discover if it holds the information requested, to locate it, and extract it – which would be in addition to putting it into any particular format requested by the requester.
We can neither confirm nor deny whether the information you have requested is held by the Trust in its entirety, because the details requested are not recorded centrally, as Team Managers manage their agency staff locally and submit them directly for payment.
Our bought ledger system record agency costs by the accounting codes for departments and cost only, – further detail would require manual interrogation of individual invoices, as invoices submitted for payment vary in the way their charges are set out – some by hours, some by day, and some for a set period of weeks.
We have estimated that reviewing and extracting relevant data from individual agency invoices would take an Officer 10 minutes per invoice, so it would take approximately 166 hours per thousand invoices and there would be many thousands of invoices over this period. This exceeds the 18 hours provisioned under FOIA to respond to a whole request.
I hope you will understand that the Trust is not obliged to respond to this question, so we will not be processing it further.
Should you wish to narrow the scope of this question, for example by requesting Trustwide agency spend over a set period, then the Trust would treat any reformulated request we receive as a fresh FOI request and we may be able to help you.