Jeremy Hunt has told the NHS to cut its soaring £3.3bn bill for agency staff, which has resulted in hospitals paying up to £3,500 for a doctor to work a single shift. The health secretary is introducing curbs on the use of employment agencies, some of which he says are “ripping off” the NHS by charging “extortionate” rates. He has acted after the annual bill for agency staff rose from £1.8bn to £3.3bn over the past three years. Hospital trusts, forced to improve quality of care since the Mid Staffs scandal, have sought to hire extra staff, but many have had difficulty attracting enough extra personnel and have increasingly relied on agency personnel to fill their rotas. New rules will introduce a maximum hourly rate that agencies can charge for a stand-in doctor or nurse’s services and cap the amount that any trust in financial trouble can spend on them. Trusts will also be banned from using agencies that are not on a new approved list. “Expensive staffing agencies are quite simply ripping off the NHS. It’s outrageous that taxpayers are being taken for a ride by companies charging up to £3,500 a shift for a doctor”, said Hunt. “The NHS is bigger than all of these companies, so we’ll use our bargaining power to drive down rates and beat them at their own game.” Hunt’s move was widely welcomed as a way of tackling the NHS’s growing financial problems and helping it deliver £22bn of efficiency savings by 2020. Hospital bosses have become increasingly frustrated by what they see as agencies exploiting the NHS’s staffing problems. Some trusts have as many as 25% fewer nurses than the number they believe they need to deliver safe, high-quality care. However, some experts raised doubts about how Hunt’s initiative would work, given the health service’s chronic lack of many types of staff, including nurses, GPs, A&E doctors and radiologists. Candace Imison, director of healthcare systems at the Nuffield Trust health thinktank, said: “There’s no doubt that the rising agency bill is an issue for hospitals up and down the country. But a cap on individual hospital trusts’ agency staff spending could put them between a rock and a hard place if they cannot meet minimum safe staffing levels without these workers.” Dr Peter Carter, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “Patient safety must always come first, so any plans for a cap on spending must ensure that it does not prevent trusts from providing safe staffing levels when there are no alternatives.” Reducing nurse training places was a “reckless and short-sighted” attempt to save money, he added. Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association, said the NHS’s greater reliance on agency staff “is a sign of stress on the system and the result of poor workforce planning by government”. Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, said mistakes by the Conservatives had led to the expanded use of agency staff. “Jeremy Hunt is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes by acting as if the £3.3bn agency bill is a problem he has suddenly discovered,” he said. “The decision to cut 6,000 nursing posts in the early years of the last parliament, alongside big reductions in nurse training places, has left the NHS in the grip of private staffing agencies.” NHS Employers said that hospitals would continue to need to recruit permanent staff from abroad to fill vacancies. Source
