Anger over NHS agency bill
David O'Leary • Published 8 Jul 2011 09:30
0 Comments
CASH-strapped health bosses in the Borders have been slammed after splashing out close to £2 million on bank and agency nurses.
The shocking NHS Borders wage bill comes despite attempts to make almost £8 million of cuts during last year.
Almost every other health authority in Scotland managed to slash its agency bill throughout last year by around a half.
But health chiefs in the Borders almost doubled their amount of nursing and midwifery hours supplied from expensive agencies - from 5454 hours in 2009/10 to 9,186 hours in 2010/11.
And while other health boards also radically cut back on their bank staff costs Borders chief executive Calum Campbell failed to make any inroads - returning a similar bill to the previous year's £1.5 million.
Local MSP Christine Grahame told the Peeblesshire News: "I am extremely disappointed with the figures. I met with Calum Campbell earlier this year and he revealed that cutting agency and bank costs was one way he was looking at making savings. Other health boards have made these savings - I can't see why NHS Borders has failed."
Efficiency drives across the country has seen the use of agency staff slashed from 337,000 hours to 176,000 in just one year. But in the Borders the bill has almost doubled - costing the health board over £276,000.
And while the country has seen a 13 per cent reduction in nursing and midwifery bank use, the Borders remains static.
The bill for both agency and bank staff was over £1.7 million.
Sheena Wright, Director of Nursing and Midwifery for NHS Borders, told us: "We are acutely aware of the cost of using agency staff, so across all services we have recently been working in partnership to review our nursing and midwifery establishments, taking account of the needs of different services to ensure we provide sustainable, high quality, safe and effective care.
"NHS Borders efficiently engage agency nurses to ensure safe provision of our services as part of a supplementary workforce to cover urgent unplanned gaps in staffing such as sickness absence or sudden, unexpected vacancies.
"We have introduced sound controls to determine appropriate access to agency nursing and as a result we have reduced our average yearly spend whenever we use an agency nurse by £10,000 - a reduction of almost £50,000 in total.
"Over the year, we used an average of 4.7 whole time equivalent staff from nursing agencies and while this is 0.4 per cent of our nursing and midwifery workforce, we are intent on further improving on this.
"Obviously in a rural setting we cannot always have Nurse Bank staff with specialist skills and therefore on rare occasions must revert to using agency staff, however we are committed to reducing agency use to a minimum."
This article appeared in Peeblesshire News 08 Jul 11
Return to the main index, get more from this section or browse our News archives.
Peeblesshire News Poll
Are you in favour of wind farms?
This Poll is now closed.
Yes (72.7%)
No (27.3%)
