Health boards shell out £43m to senior medics in bonus payments

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TOM GORDON

to NHS Grampian. In total, just over £43m was paid to 2,858 recipients in the last 12 months.

Discretionary awards for the best performing consultants can be highly lucrative. Those given the A+ rating earn an extra £75,889 a year, those rated A get £55,924, while those rated B enjoy a salary uplift of £31,959.

The SNP Government froze payment levels in 2010 amid criticism. In 2015, just under six per cent of all consultants received a distinction award, with just 26 – or one in 200 – getting an A+ award, 68 an A, and 227 a B.

The rise in overall bonus payments was driven by a hike in the wider system of locally set discretionary points, which can be worth up to £25,632 extra in pensionable salary.

The biggest payouts were in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, which added £12.6m to salaries, and was where discretionary point recipients rose from 878 to 907.

In NHS Lothian, the number of discretionary-point recipients rose from 470 to 500, adding £485,000 to a total bonus bill of £7.3m.

The bonus bill in cash-strapped NHS Tayside was £5m, for NHS Grampian £4.7m, and for NHS Lanarkshire £3.3m.

Scottish Conservative health spokesman Miles Briggs said:

“Senior medics like consultants are already very well remunerated, and many – including NHS workers further down the chain – will question the sheer scale of these payments. The NHS is extremely hard up, and these are payments worth tens of millions of pounds.

“It’s another example of the SNP Government saying it’s going to do something, then forgetting about it more or less immediately.”

Simon Barker, chair of BMA Scotland’s Consultants Committee, said: “These long-standing elements of the defined pay structure for consultants are intended to recognise those who contribute most in the delivery of safe, high-quality care to patients and to leading continuous improvement of NHS services.

“The NHS in Scotland faces competition in a global market when it comes to attracting doctors and we are steadily losing ground. In the face of a 15 per cent realterms pay cut over the last five years there are now over 400 unfilled consultant posts in Scotland, with half of these jobs lying empty for over six months.

“Every vacant position increases the strain on the rest of the health service and makes it more difficult to cope with the rapidly increasing demands the NHS faces.

Health Secretary Shona Robison said: “Over 98 per cent of NHS employees earning in excess of £100,000 are clinicians or consultants. It is right that we pay the going rate, which is reviewed annually by the independent pay review bodies, in order to attract and retain highly skilled and much sought-after staff.”

Seven-year-old Ciara Quinn aims to raise cash.