Ministers across the UK are facing calls to tackle the NHS’s chronic lack of staff as figures reveal that the bill for hiring temporary frontline workers has soared to more than £10 billion a year, reports The Guardian. Hospitals and GP surgeries across the UK are paying a record £4.6 billion for agency personnel and another £5.8 billion for doctors and nurses to do extra bank shifts to plug gaps in rotas. Widespread staffing shortages have increasingly compelled the NHS in all four UK nations to rely on employment agencies to hire stand-in workers. In England alone, the bill for agency staff, particularly nurses and GPs, has risen from £3 billion to £3.5 billion over the past year, a 16% rise. The Royal College of Nursing said the levels of agency spending were “staggering”

Spending on temporary workers overall – agency and bank staff – has “skyrocketed” in recent years because Covid has led to an already understaffed NHS coming under greater strain amid the increased demand for care and political pressure to cut the backlog, according to a report by the specialist healthcare data analysts LaingBuisson. A clampdown by the NHS in England in 2015/16 on the use of agency staff led to health service trusts reducing the amount they spent on them from £3.63 billion that year to £2.38 billion in 2019/20. But it has crept back up since then and hit £3.46 billion in 2022/23, the firm found.

NHS England said health trusts were now spending less on agency staff than before and also less as a proportion of the service’s overall spending this year. But it did not provide figures to substantiate either claim. LaingBuisson’s figures show that the NHS in England spent £3.46 billion on agency workers in 2022/23, more than the year prior.

NHS bosses blamed the huge bill for temporary personnel partly on industrial action by NHS staff. “High demand on services, overstretched budgets and staff shortages mean too often the NHS has to rely on agency and bank staff to plug workforce gaps,” said Saffron Cordery, the deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents health service trusts in England. “Trusts are doing all they can get to get a grip on agency spend and expensive overtime payments, but on top of existing challenges, wave after wave of industrial action is making it harder to ensure staff pay costs don’t rise significantly.”

An NHS England spokesperson said, “The NHS will continue to reduce reliance on agencies in the coming years by training more NHS staff domestically and retaining more existing staff, as part of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan.”

According to SIA’s UK Healthcare Staffing Market Assessment, the NHS permanent workforce would need to increase from 1.4 million in 2021/22 to between 2.2 million and 2.3 million in 2036/37 in order to meet the NHS long term workforce plan.