03.11.14
NHS spends £5.5bn in four years on agency staff
The NHS has spent £5.5bn on paying agency staff over the past four years to plug gaps in its workforce.
Agencies are charging as much as £1,800 per day per nurse leading NHS spending on temporary staff to be double the original budget in some parts of the country for the past year.
The cost of temporary staff is being made worse by the cut in NHS training places. According to the Guardian, in the last year of the Labour government, 20,829 nurse training positions were filled in England. That fell to 17,741 in 2011-12 and to 17,219 in 2012-13, rising to 18,009 in 2013-14. Figures show that there were 7,000 fewer qualified nurses in 2013 compared to 2010.
Information released by the government following a parliamentary question shows NHS foundation trusts spent £4.3bn between 2010-11 and 2013-14 on agency and temporary staff. Other NHS trusts spent £1.2bn in 2013-14, but figures were not available for these trusts over the previous years, meaning the total bill for the last four years could be closer to £10bn.The cost to NHS foundation trusts has gone up by around 20% for each of the four financial years of the coalition government. In the last year of the Labour government, NHS foundation trusts spent £734m. In 2013-14 that had doubled to £1.3bn.
“These spending figures beggar belief and are the result of truly incompetent workforce planning,” said Dr Peter Carter, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing
He added: “The last few years have seen nurse staffing levels pared back to the bare bones, and many posts have been left vacant for long periods. Nursing staff are sometimes seen as an easy target for cost savings, only for the NHS to find itself dangerously short staffed and having to plug the gap. This means individual hospitals and the NHS as a whole are spending too much on agency staff and recruitment from overseas.”
Many of the agency nurses filling the gaps are from abroad. Figures obtained by the RCN from FoI requests to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) show that in 2013-14 there were 6,228 nursing registrations from abroad, 22% of the total number of new nurses qualified to work and an increase of nearly 45% on the previous year. In the same year 4,379 nurses left the UK to work overseas. This is the first time since 2005/6 that the UK has registered more nurses from overseas than have left to work elsewhere.
Dr Carter said: “Overseas nurses have always provided a valuable service to the NHS, but cuts to student places, poor morale and short-term planning mean that now hospitals are forced to pay over the odds to agencies as they desperately try to fill vacancies.
“It is common sense that relying on short-term fixes is far more expensive in the long run. Yet the UK has been cutting the supply of nurses to save money, then realising too late that patient safety is in danger and paying even more money to recruit from overseas. It is the equivalent of relying on payday loans and it is no way to run a health service.”
A Department of Health spokesperson said: “In the wake of Mid Staffs there has been some increased spend on agency staff to correct historic understaffing, but we now have 13,500 more clinicians since May 2010 and are reducing reliance on expensive agency workers going forward — because delivering safe care and balancing the books go hand in hand.”
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