About the NHSBSA
Our vision is to be the organisation of choice to provide business solutions that deliver service excellence and value for money.
The NHS Business Services Authority is a Special Health Authority and an Arms Length Body of the Department of Health which provides a range of critical central services to NHS organisations, NHS contractors, patients and the public.
Our service portfolio includes:
- Management of the NHS Pension Scheme in England and Wales which has over 2 million members and receives contributions of over £8 billion per annum.
- Administration of the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) scheme (in the UK) processing over 5 million EHIC cards this year.
- Provision of NHS anti-fraud (in England and Wales) and security management (in England) services, which over the last 10 years have resulted in over 600 successful fraud prosecutions and the recovery of more than £65 million.
- Management of a 10-year outsourced contract for the delivery of supply chain services to the NHS (in England and Wales), supporting the planned delivery of around £1 billion of procurement savings to the NHS over the life of the contract.
- Payments to pharmacists (in England) for prescriptions dispensed in primary care settings which involves processing approximately 800 million for prescription items and payments totalling over £8 billion each year.
- Payments to dentists for work undertaken on NHS contracts which involves processing approximately 40 million dental forms and payments totalling over £2.5 billion in England and Wales.
- Provision of management information to over 25,000 registered NHS and DH users on costs and trends in prescribing and dental care in England and Wales.
- Administering a range of health benefit schemes across the UK, including a low income scheme, medical and maternity exemption schemes, tax credit NHS exemption cards (in the UK) and prescription pre-payment certificates (in England). In total we process over 6 million claims per annum.
- Provision of advice and contract management to DH departments on supply chain strategic contracts and programmes, eg Flu Pandemic Preparedness, Childhood Vaccines and Emergency Preparedness.
- Management of schemes for NHS Student Bursaries and NHS Social Work Bursaries (in England) making payments of over £530 million relating to over 100,000 registered healthcare and social work professionals.
- Management of the NHS Injury Benefit Scheme (in England and Wales) processing over 30,000 applications since the inception of the Scheme.
- Provision of a range of hosted employment, human resources and financial services for various DH teams and programmes.
Since it became operational in 2006, the NHSBSA has implemented significant improvements across all business processes, introduced a new management model of shared services and dedicated business streams, developed a robust scorecard, measured and used customer feedback and benchmarked services. Whilst care must always be taken when analysing the financial benefits of business transformation, the NHSBSA calculates that it has delivered £69.7m savings between 2005-06 and 2011-12. When these savings are considered alongside those calculated in previous years, the NHSBSA has delivered cumulative efficiencies of £232.8m which have been available to the Department of Health for reinvestment in front line services.
You can read more about us in our latest Annual Report and Accounts or in our Strategy and Business Plan.