NHS boss on £2,300 a day
Interim chiefs’ salaries worth £700k
HEALTH chiefs are being paid as much as £2,300 a day to plug gaps in senior management, shocking figures reveal.
Interim bosses at hospital trusts have commanded payments worth the equivalent of almost £700,000 a year.
Chris Bown, now permanent chief executive of Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust, was paid £70,000 for six weeks in 2017-18 – equivalent to £2,333 a day, annual accounts show.
A trust spokesman confirmed Mr Bown was now employed on a fixed-term 12-month contract worth £215,000.
Elsewhere Mark Gordon, a former Royal Marines commando, cost £410,000 for seven months as interim chief operating officer at St George’s University Hospitals Foundation Trust. Annually this is the equivalent of 28 full-time nurses.
The trust in south-west London also shelled out £300,000 for a director of estates, facilities and capital projects to work for nine months, paying a similar sum in 2016/17.
Hospital trusts defended the sums, saying the short-term appointments were a necessity and that few candidates had the required skills and experience at such senior levels.
Some of the highest rates were paid at trusts in severe difficulties at the time.
Data was collected from more than 200 NHS trusts on interim pay from the 2017-18 annual reports by the Health Service Journal. It revealed 11 members of staff were given payments that would equate to more than £200,000 a year if salaried.
East and North Herts Trust spent £135,000 to employ a chief operating officer for six and a half months, admitting it was ‘regrettably necessary’.
The equivalent post at Shefmorale. field Children’s Hospital cost £50,000 for just ten weeks’ work, the data showed.
Since October 2016, senior managers on rates of more than £750 a day have to be approved by regulator NHS Improvement unless they are in a foundation trust, and even then are encouraged to comply.
The figures come weeks after the Health Secretary ordered a crackdown on use of agency staff in NHS hospitals.
Matt Hancock said using short-term fixes to plug gaps was both expensive and bad for A spokesman for St George’s said it recognised that interim executive pay at the time was ‘extremely high’ and had been addressed by the new board members.
It said this has changed under a new chairman and chief executive, with all executive and divisional director posts now being held by permanent staff. The two staff mentioned no longer work there, he added.
He said: ‘We recognise that the level of spend on interim directors in the past was extremely high. The previous trust board at St George’s appointed interim staff to senior positions at the trust on a temporary basis.
‘This was done to help us tackle a number of urgent challenges including issues identified by the CQC in June 2016. However the number of interims in posts has reduced dramatically.’
A spokesman for Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust said: ‘We took these steps because of a pressing need to find the necessary high calibre of experienced senior executives at comparatively short notice, at a time of significant challenge.
‘Our substantive chief executive was recovering from a kidney transplant and the acting chief executive was due to leave the organisation to take another role.’
‘Spend was extremely high’