NHS Trusts could be banned from using agency staff in certain roles under tough reforms unveiled by the Department of Health and Social Care this week.
Health secretary Wes Streeting announced earlier this week that the department will launch plans to reduce the NHS’s reliance on temporary agency workers, which are estimated to cost £3 billion per year.
Under joint plans between the government and NHS England, NHS trusts could be prevented from using agencies to hire temporary entry-level workers in band 2 and 3, such as healthcare assistants and domestic support workers.
The plans will be put forward in a consultation, which will also look at proposals to stop NHS staff resigning and then re-offering their services through recruitment agencies.
NHS agency worker ban
The DHSC claimed that recruitment agencies were charging NHS trusts up to £2,000 for a single nursing shift. There are an estimated 113,000 staffing vacancies across the health service open at present.
Streeting said: “For too long desperate hospitals have been forced to pay eye-watering sums of money on temporary staff, costing the taxpayer billions, and pulling experienced staff out of the NHS. We’re not going to let the NHS get ripped off anymore.
“I am determined to make sure the money is well spent and delivers for patients. These changes could help keep staff in the NHS and make significant savings to reinvest in the frontline.”
The plans to limit agency worker use come as part of a package of reforms aimed at transforming the health service, including new league tables of NHS providers to help attract top talent to the most challenging areas.
But Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, said agency staff were being used as a “convenient scapegoat for inefficient procurement processes”.
He insisted any ban on agency staff would not solve NHS recruitment and retention issues.
He said: “There is no doubt that the NHS needs reform to be fit-for-purpose. Improving standards of care, efficiency and effectiveness is about a lot more than money.
“And getting it right will cut waiting lists, improve lives and support the economy. But as any medic would tell the Secretary of State, you fix a problem with the correct diagnosis. And when it comes to staff issues, Streeting has the wrong one.”
Carberry added: “Temporary workforce costs in the NHS are largely the wages and compliance costs of staff. That’s why bank staffing is no cheaper than agency, and why the Secretary of State discovered costs didn’t go down when switching to using overtime.”
He argued that NHS trusts needed to invest in long-term talent supply planning rather than relying on higher-cost emergency care cover.
“No ban will solve this – the NHS must meaningfully address the varying needs of staff, who want to work in different ways and many of whom will have been demoralised by the approach taken.”
“We have always said that the Department of Health putting workforce first means getting unions, staffing partners and trusts together to build an approach that attracts and retains a strong core of substantive staff and complements this with a stable and good value approach to temporary staffing.”
The REC has written to the chief executive of NHS England asking for it to work in collaboration with all stakeholders on staffing issues. Spend on nursing banks has almost tripled since 2016 after “consistent refusal to engage”, the letter states.
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