Trainee Information System - latest update from Rob Smith, Director of Workforce Planning and Intelligence

"At Health Education England, we are responsible for overseeing the training and education of doctors and other healthcare professions in England. Our Trainee Information System programme, also known as TIS, is our new, web-based system that allows us to collect and track data as doctors, dentists and public health trainees pass through their training, enabling us to access real-time information at the click of a mouse.

Following our creation in 2013, it was clear we’d inherited a complex and disparate portfolio of information systems used to manage trainees and learners across the NHS. The number and variety of these systems meant we were not able to manage trainees efficiently across our organisation.

Over the last two years, our team has been working to fix this, developing a new information system. Our first ‘release’ was designed for the revalidation of doctors in training, however since the launch of this, our major focus has been on our second release, known as TIS Core Services.  By May, all teams working within HEE had moved to this release - starting with the North East who'd helped refine the system and smooth the way for others.  TIS Core Services is what we call a “minimal viable product” because it does the basics - specifically around recording the Annual Review of Competencies Progression, placements, ESR links, the trainee record, to name a few.  Most importantly, TIS Core Services is the baseline upon which we will build other business-led improvements.

The benefits of TIS also extend across the NHS. We are planning to deploy to trusts in the next couple of months. We are also starting work on how we can open up TIS to trainees, to improve their experience of interacting with HEE’s systems, and transparency. 

We are already planning future work, which is over and above building out what we have already done.  Apart from trust and trainee access and processes, we are also starting projects for study leave, and the management of courses, events, cases and placements.  In addition, we have a separate project to expand the use of the TIS-ESR interface to support the national Streamlining Programme.  The amount of work to develop TIS as a fully supportive information system should not be understated, however, we have demonstrated that working with staff, we can produce systems that make a difference, and we will continue with this work. 

We believe that the effective management of trainees and learners should be underpinned by well-designed and integrated information systems. TIS encapsulates this approach, taking an ‘agile’ approach that responds to the business and user needs as they’re raised. It’s a very exciting time for us, and I look forward to seeing how the system develops."

Find more about the latest updates on our dedicated webpage.