Governance and Operational Services Team

Team work makes the dream work

Welcome to our team – we are the - Governance and Operational Team

The Governance and Operational team is a team of 10 people who are part of the larger Finance team of 31 at NES.  One of our team is not in our photo unfortunately, due to annual leave.

The team is based in Westport in Edinburgh.  We are sharing our iMatter story with you.

What does our team do?

• We ensure all of our supplier invoices are processed and paid
• We send out customer invoices and record/chase income
• We ensure all statutory payments are reconciled and paid
• We work with our colleagues at NSS to pay all of our staff (which includes all of the GPSTs in NHS Scotland)
• We process manual expenses
• We monitor cashflow
• We work hard
• We strive to always improve
• And much, much more….

iMatter – How do we achieve this?

• We are willing to change and we keep our minds open
• We can adapt when we face new challenges
• Most importantly, as a team we support
  each other and …

………we have fun

iMatter - What we do well

Our ability to adapt to change and face new challenges was evident when NES became the Lead Employer for GP Trainees.  This entailed NES employing an additional 600 GP Trainees across Scotland. 

Responsible for payroll and expenses, our workload increased overnight and we  developed and learned brand new processes to deal with the new scenarios.

We are now liaising regularly with many more colleagues across Scotland to ensure we improve the trainee experience.

And we are learning!

iMatter - What are our challenges

We are so busy working to meet our deadlines and to provide a good service that we don’t get enough time to learn and develop.

It would be great if we could:

• spend some time training new team members
• learning ourselves
• trying new things.

iMatter – Desired outcome

A well trained team who are confident in their roles and given time to learn.

We have lots of written procedures, but they do tend to go out of date quickly.  We agreed to review the procedures with a view to ensuring they are all updated.  This will help a new team member who is not familiar with NES or the processes – it will give them a reference point to help them to do their job independently.  Although we are happy to train our colleagues it will reduce the amount of time we need to spend with them explaining the basics – instead that time could be used to enhance their knowledge

A well trained team who are confident in their roles and given time to learn.

We are asked to cover for each other during leave or absence but we don’t always know each other’s tasks.  This means it can take a long time to accurately complete a task as we are unfamiliar with it. 

We agreed to free up time for team members to work together to share knowledge.  A rota system was incorporated whereby each member of the team has an opportunity to work on each relevant task for their role and learn it – with their colleagues on hand to provide advice.