Welfare areas | Will salary chaos come in January? The salary payment of nearly 200,000 Finns will change at the turn of the year

Will they come salaries of nurses, doctors and social workers to the accounts on time next January?

In the administration of welfare regions, the final letter of the biggest administrative reform in Finland for decades is underway. The most important things, such as salary payment systems, are being tried to be fixed, even though the rush is intense.

Social– and according to the monitoring of the Ministry of Health (STM), the welfare region of Varsinais-Suomen had completed only 12 percent of the required ict preparation tasks by the end of October. The situation also looked equally bad in the welfare regions of Lapland and Vantaa-Kerava.

Director of information management of the Varsinais-Suomen welfare area Jari Poromaa says that the ministry’s monitoring is misleading.

“There, things are monitored in an on-off manner, i.e. the matter is marked as completed only when it has been examined, tested and completely completed. At the end of October, we had 12 percent of the critical work completed, but that does not mean that 88 percent of the work was not done,” says Poromaa.

The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health admits that the percentages in the follow-up report do not tell nearly everything about the preparation.

October–November the welfare regions have made decisive decisions about which are the most important reforms. They have been put at the top of the to-do list. The most important are the functioning of payroll systems and some of the changes in information and communication technology (ict).

“Ict preparation is so challenging in big changes that its renewal is only successful if everything else is also successful. If some area, such as salary payment, is not successful, then ict will also fail”, says the special expert Timo Ukkola from STM.

According to Ukkola, disturbances can occur if wrong source information has been entered into the systems. The programs themselves work, but only if the personal information they contain matches.

At the turn of the year, 175,000 employees will be transferred from the service of municipalities to the payrolls of welfare regions.

Ministry of Finance (VM) change leader Ville-Veikko Ahonen reminds that with regard to ict at the turn of the year in welfare areas, only the mandatory must be ready. Ahonen is responsible for starting the operation of the welfare areas.

“About a month ago, I was still worried about how everything necessary would be done and whether there would be disruptions to salary payments. Now I’m not so worried anymore, because many areas have tightened so much,” says Ahonen.

According to him, the fact that the undone work has been recognized has eased the pain.

“The crux of the matter right now is how well-being areas can come to an agreement with the municipalities on the acquisition of all systems. Agreeing on that is now the most unfinished business,” says Ahonen.

The welfare areas therefore buy central blocks for the operation from the municipalities. These include, for example, communication systems, application support, user support and physical devices. Only later will we focus on renewing patient information systems.

With several the welfare areas will use the salary payment system Sarastia, which the deficiencies caused chaos in the City of Helsinki’s payroll. Helsinki adopted Sarastia in April of this year.

According to VM’s Ahonen, the key position is now personnel management.

“The systems do pay salaries if people’s information is correct in the system,” he says.

According to Ahonen, the biggest risks are related to employees whose information changes after their information has been entered into the system. If basic human information or the employment information changes and if there are new gig workers or temporary workers, this can be a problem.

If the tractor entrepreneur has plowed the health center’s yard and he has not been transferred to the new system, the reward may not come.

The welfare regions have prepared themselves by establishing disaster organizations and agreeing on additional salary payment days for January. In many areas known for the turn of the year, vacations have been canceled for administration employees.

Its in addition to the fact that precise work in personnel management requires a lot of experts and the coordination of systems requires coders, the shortage of experts has also hit the leaders of welfare areas.

“These days, the welfare regions have hired the latest personnel managers, but some regions still lack a financial manager. In quite a few areas, it has been difficult to get competent people to lead big changes,” says Ville-Veikko Ahonen, director of change at the Ministry of Finance.

For example, the director of the welfare region of Pohjois Savo Marko Korhonen admits that the employees of the administration in his area are now very hard.

“The work is done while the heads are hot. My concern is that these top people can cope now”, says Kulmala.

According to him, necessary changes are being made in Pohjois Savo and it will take years to harmonize patient information systems, for example.

Real Finland just under half a million people live in the welfare area in the area of ​​27 municipalities and a few municipal associations. According to Poromaa, 47 customer information and patient systems have been used.

The purpose is to reduce the number of systems to 20 systems at the turn of the year.

“The goal is that in two to three years we will only have 2-3 systems in use, i.e. separate systems for social care and basic health care, and possibly even a bilingual system.”

According to Poromaa, the change is huge. Even if no large system like Apot is put into use, the personnel will get new tools, and there will be learning and downtime ahead.

“Outages and small delays are focused on things that are not considered critical. Critical issues have been prepared in a variety of ways.”

Poromaa says that around 24,000 people work in the new welfare area.

“We don’t expect any risks regarding salary payment, even though there have been problems in other municipalities. We’re pretty sure there won’t be any problems. To be sure, we are prepared to handle things with many manual methods as well.”

According to Poromaa, contingency plans have also been drawn up for the customer systems in use on the social benefits side.

“There will be a lot of investigations, we will certainly have to do inspections, there will be mistakes too. But there are ways to deal with possible future problems, we have tested and thought about them extensively. We use plan B and plan C and more.”

How about patient safety, is it compromised?

“That’s the hardest question to answer. Patient safety has been such a guiding factor in all IT planning that it is not compromised. All changes will be made in such a controlled manner that the effects on emergency rooms and health centers will be minimal at most.”

Poromaa says that the customers will probably not notice the connection of the systems in any way.

When the year turns, according to Poromaa, all critical IT measures in the welfare area of ​​Varsinais-Suomen are 100% ready.

“At the turn of the year, that figure of 12 percent at the end of October has changed to one hundred percent. All the necessary things have been done, secured and tested.”