Spending on expensive agency doctors and nurses has surged at our hospitals despite recent NHS rules demanding it is slashed.
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust is on track to spend £2m a month in 2016/17 on temporary staff – an astonishing £65,750 a day or £2,739 an hour.
The trust had been aiming to cut agency spend to just under £15m after coughing up about £17m in 2015/16.
But it has already hit the £20m mark with two months to go and has been told £24.3m will be an acceptable total for the financial year.
It is thought the majority of the huge bill is on locum doctors but a significant chunk is on agency nurses who can earn more than £30,000 per year compared to between £16,500 and £24,000 for most qualified staff nurses.
Meanwhile, the trust is set to go £16m into the red this financial year – much of which has been blamed on staff costs.
Chief operating officer, Helen Barker, said: “Our priority is to provide safe, high quality, compassionate care for our patients and to do this we need to maintain staffing levels.
“With two sites, Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and Calderdale Royal Hospital, this continues to be very challenging.
“We are doing everything we can to reduce the amount we spend on agency staff both through our ongoing recruitment drive to substantive posts and regular reviews of our use of agency staffing.
“We have received additional support to enable us to cope with this very challenging winter and high numbers of patients and this has been reflected in the revised figure.”
The reliance on temporary staff comes amid huge long term problems finding permanent clinicians.
Many have blamed Brexit for making the problem worse by deterring foreign workers from taking up substantive posts.
In the years prior to the EU referendum the trust had been on a number of recruitment missions to Europe seeking nurses who were prepared to move to West Yorkshire.
But analysis by the Institute for Employment Studies has found a growing reluctance among European nurses to come here following the vote to leave the EU.
Dr Rachel Marangozov, lead author of the study, said: “The ongoing uncertainty around Brexit poses serious questions for NHS workforce planners, who need to act now to reduce the impact of ‘worst case’ scenarios.”
Proposals to axe bursaries for student nurses have dealt a further blow to the volume of domestic staff coming through the system.
