£4m spent on agency staffing

THE trust which runs the Royal Oldham Hospital spent nearly £4m on agency staff in the last financial year.

The Pennine Acute Trust, which runs four hospitals, including Oldham, revealed the figures following national news that some NHS Hospitals pay agency staff up to £200 an hour to cover shifts.

It showed some staff were paid hourly rates equivalent to salaries worth hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, while some agencies took large cuts for supplying workers to the NHS.

The Trust, which also runs the North Manchester General Hospital, Rochdale Infirmary and Fairfield Hospital, Bury, said its £4 million expenditure on agency staff last year was vital to maintain high levels of patient care.

No figures are available for individual hospitals, but the most paid out by the trust for agency staff is £80 an hour.

It spent £3.3 million on agency doctors, and £700,000 on nursing staff, out of its total £400 million wages bill, amounting to less than 1.3 per cent of staff costs.

A spokesman for the trust said: “This relatively low figure means we did not exceed our medical staffing budget.

“Employing permanent staff through recruitment drives will continue, but in the short term it is imperative that agency staff are employed to maintain the high levels of care patients currently receive.

“The majority of our temporary doctors and nurses are covering staff sickness or vacancies waiting to be filled by permanent appointments.”

And NHS Oldham (formerly the Oldham Primary Care Trust) paid out £722,000 from April to September last year, accounting for just under five per cent of its wages bill.

It does not keep records of hourly rates paid to agency staff.

Shauna Dixon, director of clinical leadership for NHS Oldham, said it employed temporary staff to cover for staff sickness and where skills shortages meant there were no staff available to do a job, when it used health-authority approved agencies with agreed levels of standards and salaries.

It also recruits temporary staff to carry out short-term specific projects when there is no capacity among existing staff to do the work.