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'£120 an hour' for NHS workers

03/02/2008

NHS agency workers have been paid hourly rates as high as £120 to cover staffing gaps over the last year, according to newly released figures.

Statistics obtained by the Conservative party under the Freedom of Information Act show an agency nurse was paid £121.59 an hour by the Royal Berkshire trust while a human resources manager received hourly payments of £100 in Blackburn.

The Commons Public Accounts Committee claimed last year that while using temporary staff was crucial for allowing hospitals to operate more flexibly, the practice could be costly as well as negatively impacting upon patient care.

Temporary staff are employed to plug gaps in staffing but the cost of using agency workers has soared in the last decade.

While the Department of Health's £1.187 billion bill for NHS agency staff in 2005-06 was down from the 2003-06 total of £1.45 billion, it remained markedly higher than the £540 million spent in 1997.

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley commented: "Labour's chaotic, short-term planning has let down NHS staff. Some stability for them is the least we would have expected from the billions that the government has poured into the NHS.

"It's incredible that agency staff can be paid such high hourly rates when jobs are being cut at the same time. This is typical of the waste that's occurred under this government."

The Tories requested the figures from NHS trusts in November last year in an attempt to discover the highest hourly rate paid to an agency worker over the past 12 months.