Middlemen are reportedly charging the NHS half a billion pounds a year to provide agency staff.
The premium, paid on top of high wages to locum nurses and doctors, has turned up in a Daily Mail audit. Recruitment firms have boasted of making record profits due to increased demand for NHS services post-pandemic, with one director alone earning more than £500,000 last year.
Theresa Villiers, a Tory former Cabinet minister, told The Daily Mail: “This is shocking and it has to stop. These funds should be devoted to patient care. Both the NHS and the Government need to get a grip on this and get these costs down. This is ripping off the taxpayer and the NHS.”
While the NHS faces a staffing crisis with shortfalls of 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives, locums have been increasingly called upon to fill rota holes. Locums can be called upon to work from a single day to a month.
NHS England spent £3 billion of its total £136 billion budget on agency staff this year to plug staffing gaps, the audit showed.
