Cover of IPEM Guidance On ESR Coding

IPEM Guidance On ESR Coding

Institute of Phyiscs and Engineering in Medicine - *Free access to non members*

Workforce Intelligence Unit

IPEM Guidance on the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) coding.

The Electronic Staff Record (ESR) is a workforce management solution for the NHS in England and Wales.

ESR is updated periodically with coding undertaken within HR departments, working with scientific and technical managers to ensure accuracy. 

You can learn more about ESR by visiting the NHS ESR website here.


NHS England and Wales has updated its Electronic Staff Record (ESR) coding for healthcare science staff.

The new structure does not reflect the introduction of the Bioinformatics theme into MSC, and we are querying this with the HSCiC.

  • Interim guidance on the National Workforce Data Set was issued in 2013 by the Health & Social Care Information Centre (HSCiC).
  • IPEM has produced best practice and uniform guidance to assist science and technical managers in consistently allocating ESR codes to medical physics and clinical engineering posts, which can be viewed below.

NHS Digital have produced some Electronic Staff Record (ESR) guidance documents for organisations that use the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) and/or employ NHS staff. They provide guidance on the use of key data items from the National Workforce Data set (NWD) to enable those using ESR to make informed coding decisions and improve data quality.