Scottish Conservative and Unionist MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife, Roz McCall says the amount being spent by NHS Fife on bank and agency staff is “eye-watering.”
Ms McCall’s comments come after new statistics revealed that the overall spending on bank and agency staff by NHS Scotland has soared to £567 million. NHS Fife’s spending on bank and agency staff has skyrocketed from £14.9 million to £44.7 million.
The figures nationally are up by more than a third on the £423 million spent in the previous year and represent a 165-per-cent rise on the £213.5 million spent in 2014/15 – the first year for which there is publicly available data.
The £567 million is comprised of a record £447.4 million spent on temporary nursing and midwifery staff and a further £119.6 million spent on locum doctors and dentists.
In NHS Fife a total of £31.2 million was spent on bank and agency staff in 2022/23, while a further £13.5 million was spent on locum staff.
This represented a rise of 45.9% from the previous year, while the locum spend also represented a 16.8% rise.
The figures also dwarf the £8.1 million spent in total in 2014/15.
Ms McCall says the rises fly in the face of the SNP’s promise in 2017 to give “significant priority” to reducing the use of agency nurses and locum doctors.
Roz McCall MSP added that the surging figures in NHS Fife are a shameful reflection of the SNP’s poor workforce planning and chronic mismanagement of the NHS
Scottish Conservative and Unionist MSP Roz McCall said:
“These shocking figures highlight where our NHS in Fife is going wrong under the SNP.
“The seemingly unstoppable rise in spending on agency staff in NHS Fife is a shameful reflection on the SNP’s dire workforce planning and management of our NHS.
“Locum doctors and agency staff do play a key role in supporting health services in NHS Fife and I thank them for the work they do.
“However, due to the SNP’s failure to recruit enough permanent staff in NHS Fife there is an ever-increasing reliance on expensive agency staff.
“Every penny is a prisoner given the huge demand on services in NHS Fife so we can’t afford to spend ever-increasing sums on agency staff.
“The new SNP health secretary Michael Matheson has been left an almighty mess by Humza Yousaf, but he needs to get an urgent grip on NHS workforce planning in NHS Fife to ensure that we can get the modern, efficient and local health service patients and staff in Fife deserve.”
