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UK – NHS hospital paid £1,800 for agency worker for one day

31 July 2014

NHS hospitals are so short staffed on public holidays they are paying almost £150 an hour for nurses to work, according to Sky News. On the May Day Bank Holiday, on the 5 May this year a locum agency was reportedly paid more than £1,800 to supply a nurse for a 12-hour shift. Another hospital is reported to have paid £2,500 for a doctor to work that day.

Obtained through a Freedom of Information request, the figures reveal how much the NHS is relying on private locum staff on public holidays. In one hospital, half of the doctors who worked on 5 May were locum medics. At another hospital almost one third of the nursing staff were supplied by a private agency.

Experts say that using locum staff unfamiliar with the hospitals they are working in can put patient care at risk.

With the NHS under increasing financial pressure, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) wants the amount hospitals pay agencies to be reviewed.

Dr Peter Carter, Chief Executive of the RCN, said: "These figures are truly shocking. Many [of the nurses] will never have been to that ward before and will probably never be there again. It says nothing about continuity of care. Even finding your way round the ward, the geography, it makes life really difficult.”

"Agency nurses do not provide good value for money … and the employers who use these extraordinary levels should be held to account for it. This is public money that is not being well spent. This is something that should be looked at with the utmost urgency," he added.

More than half (80) of the 150 NHS trusts in England responded to a request from Sky News asking how many locum staff they employed and at what rates on 5 May this year.

At the Heart of England NHS Trust in the West Midlands, half the doctors working that day were temporary locum medics. More than three in ten nurses at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Trust and at Southend NHS Trust were from agencies. Meanwhile, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay (NHS Foundation Trust) paid an agency £2,500 for a locum doctor to work a single shift.

University Hospitals Bristol (NHS Foundation Trust) paid £1,800 for a nurse on a shift of just over 12 hours, the equivalent of almost £150 an hour. Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust paid almost as much (£1,798) for a middle grade nurse specialising in mental health, which is almost a month's pay for the average nurse.

Separate figures published in April suggested that the NHS has spent £2 billion on agency staff since 2010/11.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: "We now have 6,700 more doctors and 6,200 more nurses directly employed by NHS organisations than in 2010. The figures … are not a full picture of staffing in the NHS, but we encourage all trusts to maintain a tight grip on their staff costs and we will hold poor performers to account."

Some of the staff provided to hospitals are highly specialised and are often in short-supply. They are therefore able to earn inflated rates of pay as a result of their skill set and their scarceness in the market. The cost of supplying the staff also includes PAYE tax, national insurance contributions for employers and employees, and holiday pay.