£500k-a-day bill to plug NHS staff gaps
NEARLY £500,000 a day is being spent on drafting in temporary workers to Scotland’s hospitals to cover staff shortages.
A total of £171.4million went on private agency personnel last year, figures published by the Scottish Government show.
Spending has nearly doubled in the decade since the SNP came to power, sparking renewed concerns about ‘mismanagement of the NHS’.
The scale of the expenditure means that £470,000 a day is now being handed to agency workers.
It comes despite the SNP regularly railing against the involvement of the private sector in the NHS.
The figure emerged after a parliamentary question from Miles Briggs, health spokesman for the Scottish Conservatives. He said: ‘Agency staff are really important in our NHS as they are flexible and can fill short-term staffing gaps, as well as reducing waiting lists.
‘However, the SNP mismanagement of the NHS has clearly led to a long-term reliance on agency staff at very high cost.
‘These figures expose the utter hypocrisy of the SNP as it has consistently spoken against private involvement in the NHS while spending half a million pounds each day to agency staff.
‘The SNP has totally failed to ensure that staffing levels in the NHS are sufficient and, with morale at rock bottom among doctors and nurses, this will only get worse. It’s time the SNP took responsibility for this situation, get on with the day job and make sure our NHS has enough staff to function properly.’
Total spending of £171.4million on agency staff is a slight drop from 2015-16, when they cost the NHS in Scotland £174.2 million. But last year’s figure is 81 per cent higher than the £94.7million spent in 2006-07 – the year before the SNP came to power.
The biggest bill last year was in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, with £28.8million. Grampian’s was £23.1million; Lothian, £19.1million; Highland, £16.4million; and Lanark, £14.9 million.
Several health boards have faced dramatic increases in their spending on agency staff in the past year. In Ayrshire and Arran there was an increase of almost £3million, while in Grampian the figure rose by £4million.
The Scottish Government said: ‘Annually, the NHS spends over £6.5billion on staffing. NHS staffing levels in Scotland are at a record high level, have increased by over 12,400 under this Government and the cost of agency staff has reduced in the last year.
‘To support our twin approach of investment and reform, the Draft Budget increases the health resource budget by more than £400million, taking it to a record high of over £13.1billion and providing additional investment in frontline NHS boards of 3.7 per cent.
‘All NHS boards have clear action plans in place to reduce the use of agency staff further, as well as arrangements to ensure that when temporary staff are required, agency are the last resort.’