Part of National Workforce Reporting Service (NWRS) guidance and support
Staff leavers, transfers and deleting records
Marking staff as leavers
If a member of staff has left your organisation, you should record this by viewing their record, going to the contract section, and then changing the response to Are they still working here to No.
You will then be asked a couple of questions on the reason for leaving and their destination. After answering these you should save the record, check your responses, and then click Submit.
Transferring a member of staff to another organisation
To move a record from your practice or PCN to another, click ‘View’ on the record you would like to transfer and then Transfer.
Search for the Destination organisation the person is moving to then click Transfer to confirm the transfer. Wait for the Transfer complete screen to appear and then click Back to home. You can use the ODS Data Search and Export (DSE) service to search for the official ODS code and organisation name.
The system does not currently have functionality to transfer from a GP practice to a PCN, or vice-versa, but this is in development. In the interim, you will need to ensure that a registered user at the new organisation recreates the records before you delete them from your organisation.
You should select duplicate record as the reason for deletion. Please email us if you need help identifying a contact at the recipient organisation.
What to do when a member of staff has been transferred to your organisation
If the record has been transferred correctly (i.e., the person is just about to start employment at your organisation) then you should review the record and add any missing information for example contract type, weekly and average hours worked and start date. Please ensure this is accurate so that the person will only be counted in your organisation when they are working there.
You then need to complete the record so that the status changes from "transferred in" to submitted”. Once you have done this, check in the staff table for your organisation to ensure that the record’s “Incomplete” tag has been removed.
If the person has been transferred incorrectly and they will not be working at your organisation, then you can delete the record by using the Created in error option.
Please notify somebody at the originating organisation if possible.
If you have already created a record for this person, then please delete the transferred record using Duplicate record as the reason.
Deleting a staff record
(Practice staff and PCN modules)
View the record for the member of staff; at the top of the screen, you’ll see a Delete button to click.
You will be asked for the reason for deletion the two options are Duplicate record and Created in error.
Once a record has been deleted from NWRS, this cannot be reversed.
Records should not be deleted unless you have one for somebody that has never worked at your organisation, you accidentally added a record for somebody working at another organisation you have access to, or you have an exact duplicate of this record in your staff table.
For PCN contracted services and GP locums, view the record for the member of staff; at the top of the screen, you’ll see a Delete button to click. You will be asked for the reason for deletion the three options are “Duplicate record”, “Created in Error”, and “No longer use service”.
Note that if you’ve previously used the workaround to zero the hours for PCN contracted services or GP locums to indicate that your organisation is no longer using this service, you should now delete these records using the “No longer use service” reason for deletion.
Do not delete locums until 3 months after they were last employed. This is to ensure we can extract the locum hours three months at a time on a rolling basis. Until these 3 months have passed, please enter 0 hours worked where the locum is not working at your organisation.
Impact of deleting records
Records should only be deleted if they have been entered incorrectly or have been identified as a duplicate record. Someone who has left would be marked as a leaver and will remain in the staff table as inactive.
The NWRS is a live system and a record marked as “Submitted” indicates that it will be included in the system extract at the end of the month.
NHS England extracts data every month and the records in the extract are retained on our internal secure database for the purpose of preparing aggregate primary care workforce statistics.
The extract only includes records marked as submitted so to ensure your staff are included in the statistical counts for your organisation, you need to ensure that all your records are complete on the system (have passed all mandatory validation checks).
Removing staff recorded on NWRS
If staff have been recorded incorrectly or you’ve identified a duplicate record, you can delete them. If they worked at your organisation but no longer do, please mark them as a leaver.
If they are recorded against the PCN and should be against the practice, or vice-versa, you’ll need to re-enter the data against the correct organisation and delete the other records.
Email us if you need help identifying a contact at another organisation.
Deleting non active staff
Please do not delete any staff records, unless they are duplicate records, or the person has never worked at your organisation.
We are developing NWRS functionality so that staff that have been inactive for a certain time will be removed from the system on a rolling basis but until then, please see the ‘Using the Service to View Data’ section of this guidance and follow the instructions to filter your staff list (so these records do not appear on your staff table).
Last edited: 3 July 2025 12:31 pm