03.08.15
Escalating spend on agency staff is a ‘deep concern’ – Nuffield Trust
With nearly a fifth trusts across the NHS spending more than a tenth of their total staff budget on agency the situation has become a ‘deep concern’, a health think tank has told NHE.
An NHE FoI investigation found that 30 out of 176 trusts had spent at least more than 10% of their total staffing budget on agency. We found that Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust spent the highest proportion – £29.3m or 21.2% of its £138m total staffing budget on agency.
Responding to our findings, Candace Imison, director of healthcare systems at the Nuffield Trust, told us that the situation across the NHS is worrying.
“The escalating spend on agency is of deep concern for two reasons,” she said. “Firstly it inflates staff costs at a time when trusts are under huge pressure to contain them. Secondly a high dependency on agency staff is a threat to high-quality care and strong staff engagement.”
Recently, the health secretary unveiled a package of tough new financial controls to clampdown on agency staffing costs, but Imison said that while the attempts to limit the rates charged for agency staff are to be welcomed, “this does little to tackle the underlying causes”.
“Action is needed to grow the supply of nurses but also to make the roles in ‘hard to recruit’ areas, such as care of the elderly, more attractive,” she added.
NHE’s full FoI investigation into agency spend is in the July/August 2015 edition of the magazine.