About Corporate Functions

The NHS employs 1.4 million people across the country, making it one of our biggest employers in every town, village and city.  There are a wide range of qualified and unqualified roles in the corporate functions such as Finance, Estates, IT and HR right across the NHS system. It would certainly be possible to find local entry level training roles, or qualified roles if you were an experienced professional moving from another sector.

• Estates and facilities roles within their teams are essential in the NHS. They are concerned with looking after the places where care is delivered, both the buildings themselves and the systems that keep them running such as heating and lighting.

The NHS has a huge property portfolio, making estates and facilities managers a very important part of the workforce.

• Our finance roles make sure that our frontline staff have the resources they need to be able to deliver the treatment and care our patients need.

Looking after the finances of an NHS organisation, whether it is a large hospital trust, ambulance service trust or clinical commissioning group, is like running a large company. As a member of the finance workforce, you’ll be responsible for ensuring that the funds for these organisations are allocated and spent appropriately for the good of our staff and patients.

• Our HR roles make sure that our frontline staff and other colleagues are supported and available to deliver the care our patients need. 

You'll have growing responsibility for supporting recruitment, selection, appraisal, staff development and training, understanding and implementing employment legislation and welfare.

Working in HR, you may have responsibility for workforce planning or work for one or more directorates, such as surgery or accident and emergency where you will provide HR support and advice. This might involve:

• advising on the redeployment of staff from a ward that is closing
• advertising strategies for the recruitment of new staff.
• Information and communication technology (ICT) is the development, management and support of the ICT infrastructure in health organisations, including the personal computers, email systems and mobile communications.

ICT staff are responsible for all internal and external electronic communication networks, including:

• wide area networks (WAN) and local area networks (LAN) that link systems in healthcare organisations, including WiFi
• the hardware eg desktop computers, printers, laptops, tablets and smartphones
• software systems eg email systems, applications and systems, such as patient records

ICT staff are hands-on. They diagnose and fix faults, support staff who use the systems, and develop improvements. Working in ICT will appeal to you if you have a natural flair for computing.