Jeremy Hunt makes plans to cut £3.3bn bill for agency medical staff

 The Health Secretary has responded after the annual bill for agency staff rose from £1.8bn to £3.3bn over the past three years. He has said that “expensive staffing agencies are quite simply ripping off the NHS. It’s outrageous that taxpayers are being taken for a ride by companies charging up to £3,500 a shift for a doctor. The NHS is bigger than all of these companies, so we’ll use that bargaining power to drive down rates and beat them at their own game.”

New rules will set a maximum hourly rate for agency doctors and nurses, ban the use of agencies that are not approved, and put a cap on total agency staff spending for each NHS trust in financial difficulty. Hunt’s move will work as a way of tackling the NHS’s growing financial problems and helping it deliver £22bn of efficiency savings by 2020.

However, Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham accused Hunt of “trying to pull the wool over people's eyes,” suggesting the £3bn agency bill is part of a larger problem created by “Tory mismanagement of the NHS.” He said: "The decision to cut 6,000 nursing posts in the early years of the last parliament, alongside big reductions in nurse training places, has left the NHS in the grip of private staffing agencies.” 


NHS Employers has responded to Jeremy Hunt’s announcement. Danny Mortimer, chief executive of the NHS Employers organisation, said “Patient safety is our absolute priority and it’s important to remember that agency staff are useful for ensuring continuity and quality of care. In controlled, smaller numbers agency and bank staff will have a long-term future helping the NHS respond to fluctuations in demand.”

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