REC Response to Jeremy Hunt’s Announcement of Cap on Agency Spend in the NHS

 

Responding to the Secretary of State for Health’s comments about ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘rip-off’ agencies when expanding on his plans to cap agency spend in the NHS today, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation’s Director of Policy Tom Hadley says:

 

“Yet again, the Secretary of State is grossly misrepresenting the role agencies play in supporting the NHS, and scapegoating agencies for years of poor workforce planning by the government. The overwhelming majority of trusts use frameworks to obtain agency staff, where pay rates are negotiated and set by NHS trusts and central government. The Secretary of State is deliberately presenting extreme, outlier, off-framework instances as if they were the norm.

 

“The average band five nurse earns £20-£25 per hour and an agency A&E doctor earns around £60 per hour. On top of this the agency would charge a fee of between 10-20 per cent to cover the costs of recruiting and vetting the worker. For this fee the agency would also have to commit to any training updates and revalidation checks for the worker. When you take into account the shifts that an agency nurse or doctor would work, their pay often equates with a permanent NHS employee.

 

“Far from ‘ripping off’ the NHS, recruiters are working all hours to make sure our wards are safely staffed. Even Monitor’s own recent report on NHS trust finances acknowledged that increasing agency spend was due to increasing demand and skills shortages, not escalating or ‘rip off’ rates.”

 

Ends

 

Notes to editors:

In an online poll in June 2015 of 60 REC members supplying staff to the NHS:

 

1 in 5 (22%) told us they are being asked to find staff to fill more than 200 NHS vacancies every week.
95% of agencies polled said they have fielded requests to find agency nurses and doctors to fill a shift at less than 24 hours’ notice.
87% of agencies have been asked to find agency staff to cover shifts over Bank or other national holidays. (This points to poor management of rotas internally in the NHS – not ensuring permanent staff available to cover shifts at holiday periods.)
64% (almost two thirds) of recruiters have fielded calls from NHS managers requesting agency staff between the hours of midnight and 8am.
53% of agencies say they have provided temporary staff to an NHS trust to help it deal with the aftermath of a local emergency such as a fire/car accident, flu epidemic or the discovery of wards infected with MRSA or C-difficile.