HEALTH chiefs at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust spent £14,053,000 on doctors from private agencies to plug gaps in its workforce last year.
The multi-million-pound sum was revealed in a Freedom of Information request by Worcester Labour Party who claim the figures reveal the ‘cost of understaffing’ in the county’s hospitals.
Agency staff are brought in to cover when there aren’t enough staff on shift, at a far higher cost than those who work full time for the NHS. .
In total the NHS has spent £4.6billion on agency doctors in the last five years. This year it paid £3billion to agencies who provide doctors and nurses at short notice, a 20 per cent increase compared with last year.
Trusts spent a further £6billion on bank staff, when NHS staff are paid to do temporary shifts, taking the total spent on additional staff to around £9.2billion.
The NHS currently has 9,000 vacancies for doctors, with a record 133,000 vacancies in total.
Tom Collins, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Worcester said: “Desperate hospitals are forced to pay rip-off fees to agencies, because of the failure to train enough doctors and nurses over the past 12 years.
“It is infuriating while taxpayers are paying over the odds on agency staff, the government has cut medical school places, turning away thousands of straight-A students in England.
“We need doctors and nurses, not non-doms.”
In response, Dr Christine Blanshard, chief medical officer at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Like many NHS organisations, to put patients first and keep our services running safely and effectively we sometimes have to use temporary staff to provide cover for sickness absence, including due to Covid-19, or vacant posts, particularly those where there may be a national shortage of staff as well as providing additional staffing to manage urgent and emergency care demand or to deal with waiting list backlogs.
“This includes consultants or other senior medical staff who, over a 24-hour period, deliver care for patients in our wards and departments as well as providing on-call cover if required.
“Using bank or agency staff does attract a premium cost, particularly where cover is required at short notice.
“We continue to actively recruit medical and nursing staff to reduce our reliance on bank and agency staff.”
