NHS spends £25m on agency midwives a year

The NHS spent £25 million on agency midwives last year – a figure that has doubled in two years, a new report claims.

A rapid rise in the spend on agency staff was blamed on plugging gaps in the rota, rising overtime costs and large spends on NHS bank staff.

The Government has tried to clamp down on spiraling agency costs by introducing caps on how much each trust can pay agency staff.

But the new figures found hospitals are still heavily relying on agencies, paying an average of £41.25 per hour for midwives.

Around half of that cost is known to go straight to the agency.

Despite the Government’s efforts to clamp down on agency spending, some hospitals are still relying on agencies, paying an average of £41.25 per hour for midwives

The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) sent Freedom of Information requests to all NHS trusts in England with maternity units.

Of the 123 (92 per cent) which responded, less than 40 per cent used agency staff in 2015.

It found that of the 46 NHS trust that did outsource staff, 28 relied on them every month.

Eight trusts spent more than £1 million on agency staff alone in 2015, with West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust the highest, spending £2.25 million.

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Between them, the average spend per trust was £542,394.

But the total yearly spend of £24.95 million was up on the £17.85 million the year before and £11.75 million in 2013.

From 2012 to 2015, the total spend on agency midwives was almost £65 million, the study found.  

Between 2014 and 2015, there was a 40 per cent rise in agency spending and a 146 per cent rise over the four years. 

The total yearly spend of £24.95 million was up on the £17.85 million the year before and £11.75 million in 2013, a report found

A further £4.52 million was spent on overtime in 2015, while spending on bank staff – in-house NHS workers who want to work flexibly across health trusts – was £43.23 million.

Overtime spend on midwives costs the NHS about half as much as agency staff – £23.06 per hour – while bank staff cost £25.63 on average per hour.

The combined spend on agency midwives, overtime and bank midwives to the NHS reached £72.7 million in 2015.

Experts claim this is enough money to pay for 2,063 full-time midwives with a decade of experience, or 3,318 full-time newly-qualified midwives.

Jon Skewes, from the RCM, said England currently has a shortage of 3,500 midwives and the money being spent would easily plug workforce gaps.

He added: ‘The findings of this report are deeply concerning and clearly reveal that many trusts within England are far too reliant on agency and bank midwives.

‘This is an incredibly expensive and wasteful way to staff maternity units and it simply cannot continue. 

‘For over a decade now the RCM has warned that an over-reliance on temporary staff will inevitably cost more in the long run.

‘There were 23 trusts that spent over £1 million on agency, bank and overtime and 12 of the highest spenders were in London. 

NHS TO NAME AND SHAME AGENCY-RELIANT TRUSTS

Health bosses are to name and shame hospitals which spend too much money on agency staff.

New figures showed the NHS in England is paying £250 million a month for agency workers.

League tables of agency spending and the 20 highest earning outsourced staff per trust will be published in a new measure to curb costs. 

Trusts have also been told to object excessive rates – particularly by agency staff who are able to negotiate their own rates. 

NHS Improvement chief executive Jim Mackey said the health service could not afford to carry on ‘forking out for hugely expensive agency staff’. 

‘An over-reliance on temporary staff is clearly more expensive than employing the correct number of permanent staff and needs to be corrected sooner rather than later.’ 

An NHS Improvement spokeswoman said: ‘This report shines a light on one of the ways in which overuse of expensive agency staff is presenting problems for the NHS.

‘Over the course of 2015/16, the NHS was on course to spend around £4bn on agency staff, which is why we introduced the agency controls and price cap. 

‘We are committed to helping the NHS cut the cost of agency midwives and all agency staff, so that patients get the right care, from the right staff, at the right time.’  

This comes after health bosses have agreed to name and shame the highest-spending trusts.

The NHS in England was found to be spending more than £3 billion on outsourced workers last year.

But experts say since clamping down measures were introduced last October, such as caps on hourly rates, they have saved £600 million. 

However, NHS Improvement said the spending was still ‘too high’ and has announced further measures to curb spending.