Worcestershire hospital pays £4,500 for single agency doctor shift

Worcestershire Acute Hospital NHS Trust paid the eye-watering fee for the single shift in a year where more than £14 million was shelled out on temporary doctors from private agencies to plug gaps in its workforce.

Agency staff are brought in to cover when there are not enough staff on shift and come at a far higher cost than those who work full-time for the NHS.

Hospital trust bosses said it was having to pay eye-watering amounts for temporary staff to cover sicknesses and vacancies and to “put patients first.”

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.”

In total, the NHS has spent £4.6 billion on agency doctors in the last five years, according to a freedom of information request by Labour, and paid £3 billion to agencies who provide doctors and nurses at short notice – a 20 per cent increase compared to last year.

Trusts spent a further £6 billion on bank staff, when NHS staff are paid to do temporary shifts, taking the total spent on additional staff to around £9.2 billion.

The NHS currently has 9,000 vacancies for doctors, with 133,000 vacancies in total.