Agency Nurses Play a Vital Role in Ensuring Safe Staffing Ratios and Quality Care - REC

Responding to Jeremy Hunt’s remarks about ‘rip off’ agencies and the proposal  to introduce new caps from next week on NHS trust’s spend on agency nurses, Tom Hadley, Director of Policy at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation says:

“The language and tone from Jeremy Hunt is outrageous. Agency nurses play a vital role in ensuring safe staffing ratios and quality patient care in an NHS that cannot find sufficient permanent staff. He is scapegoating agencies for the NHS’s own mismanagement of workforce planning.

“Nobody objects to there being set parameters for pricing of agency staff, but they already exist in the form of NHS framework agreements.
“We just don’t see how it is feasible to bring in new rules at this short notice.

“We are disappointed that the Department of Health has not consulted around the introduction of these new rules and await more detail about exactly how they propose to reconcile them with NHS trusts’ legal responsibility to ensure safe staffing levels on wards.

“What happens, for instance, if there is a cold snap and a trust needs staff instantly to manage an influx of demand but they have already reached their newly imposed cap on overall spend?”