NHS England has awarded an interim contract with an estimated value of £1,990,000 to SiteKit Applications for technical services to support development of the Digital Staff Passport, with the appointment aiming to bring on board a “capable and competent supplier” to support with project management, technical application development, development operations, testing and more.
The contract with SiteKit, the result of a call-off from a framework agreement, is set to run until the end of August 2024, with NHSE stating that the “rationale for this interim contract 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.”
SiteKit describes itself as delivering “seamless” integrated solutions designed to improve healthcare system efficiency, working with data, digital strategies, software development and application and more. An area of note is that of identity and access management, with SiteKit stating that they work with the health and social care system to “evolve its identity verification, authentication and authorisation platforms”.
Last summer, an implementation plan was published following the establishment of the elective recovery taskforce which shared how NHSE was in the process of developing the NHS Digital Staff Passport. In the plan, it was noted that the passport would enable a verified virtual record of a doctor’s training and occupational health records, with the overall aim to reduce the administrative burden when moving between providers.
The prior information notice declaring the intention to launch a £50 million digital staff passport technology framework was published last May.
In August 2022, the government’s central digital and data office published a report from a cross-government alpha assessment of the NHS Digital Staff Passport service which found that four of the 15 standards were not met in evaluation. However, a follow-up report three months later confirmed that the service had met the standards and shared praise from the assessment panel towards the way the team had widened the range of end users in research to consider factors such as age and digital abilities; developed the user needs to be more user-centred and behaviour-based; and added a progress checker to make the service more intuitive.
