NHS staff waiting months to be paid for pandemic shifts

DOCTORS and nurses have been forced to wait up to 100 days to be paid for extra frontline shifts during the pandemic, prompting concerns the situation could exacerbate NHS staff shortages.

Data from Freedom of Information requests revealed numerous cases of staff waiting months to be paid. One junior doctor said they had been waiting since August to be paid for an A&E shift. “The main problem is when you do locum shifts,” the junior doctor said.

Last year, 292 employees at North Cumbria Integrated Care trust were paid late, including one staff member who was paid 102 days late. At Worcestershire Acute Hospitals trust 578 staff also had their pay delayed.

Patricia Marquis, the Royal College of Nursing’s England director, said bosses risked losing thousands of experienced nurses “essential to safe patient care”.

North Cumbria trust said that delayed payments represented “around 0.3 per cent of all payments” during 2021.