Professor Sue Richards with Praful Nargund

NHS campaigners have described the amount of money spent on agency doctors and nurses at a hospital Trust in the last financial year as “farcical” and “a scandal”.

A request for ­­infor­­mation by Councillor Praful Nargund under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that temporary staff at the Whittington Hospital – known as locums, who are employed by agencies – cost the trust around £17million between April 2022 and April 2023.

The Labour councillor for Barnsbury ward, whose parents have been NHS doctors for decades, said: “It’s not just unjust, it’s also farcical too, that we have a situation where the NHS is having real crises in recruitment and retention and at the same time is having to pay huge amounts of money to locums.”

Calling them “huge figures,” he described how some locum agency firms have seen their profits increase by 75 per cent in the past four years, and called for public money to be paid to doctors and nurses – who have been out striking for better pay and conditions – rather than being drained out of the NHS and into private companies.

His FOI revealed that while spending on locum doctors had increased by half a million pounds last year, spending on locum nurses had trebled since 2020-21 – and cost the Whittington just under £10million last year.

The Whittington Hospital

The FOI details also revealed that in 2021-22, the Trust paid out £2,400 to a locum agency for just one shift by a doctor. Junior doctors graduating this year will earn just over £2,000 per month after tax.

Campaigners put staffing problems at the Whittington – and across the NHS – down to extreme staff unhappiness.  Over several months, doctors, nurses and non-medical staff have either been in a row with the government over pay and conditions and are planning to strike or have just finished striking after coming to an agreement with ministers.

Nursing strikes gripped the trust this year before a deal between ministers and unions was brokered in June, while consultant and junior doctors are planning to strike together – for the first time in the NHS’s history – later this month, and then again in October.

Professor Sue Richards of Keep Our NHS Public, warned that doctors, nurses and other hospital staff are leaving because they can get better money in other countries or are simply burned out by the workload.

The retired Professor of Public Management at the University of Birmingham, who lives in Essex Road, said the government’s management of the NHS had been “scandalously poor”.

“I think people should believe that we can have – and deserve – a proper health service,” she added, but warned that “sheer neglect, poor management and also a desire to cut the NHS down to size I think, from a Tory government, meant that it was no longer functioning as it should be. “The last Labour government did a few things wrong with health but they certainly increased the funding to the same average level as the rest of western Europe. “And that’s essentially what you need to do. It’s well below that now.”

A spokesperson for the Whittington Trust said: “At Whittington Health, patient safety is our priority and we bring in temporary staff when required to ensure our services can continue to run safely.

“While our organisation does face recruitment and retention challenges, we see this reflected nationally across other NHS organisations. There are multiple reasons why we are seeing a shortage of staff; however, our current overall vacancy rate is 11 per cent and this has been steadily decreasing over the last 18 months.

“Looking forward, we have a strong focus on recruitment and a healthy pipeline of staff joining us over the next few months.”