
From the Guardian today:
NHS across UK spends a ‘staggering’ £10bn on temporary staff
Ministers are facing calls to tackle the NHS’s chronic lack of staff as figures reveal that the bill for hiring temporary frontline workers has soared to more than £10bn a year.
Hospitals and GP surgeries across the UK are paying a record £4.6bn for agency personnel and another £5.8bn for doctors and nurses on staff to do extra “bank” shifts to plug gaps in rotas.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/16/nhs-across-uk-spends-a-staggering-10bn-on-temporary-staff
Read on and, of course, these are figures from NHS England only.
So, £10.4bn in total.
All things being equal, that should be £1.04bn in NHS Scotland.
According to BBC Scotland in June 2023, it was ‘Spending on NHS temporary staff in Scotland reaches record high‘ but only £567m or just over half the figure for NHS England, pro rata.

These bought in agency services is an example of rentierism. A rentier is someone who, on the pretext of providing a service, actually sucks money from the economy without contributing to the economy. A rentier can be compared to a parasite.
This situation has been artificially created by the NHS ‘reforms’ instituted by the Thatcher government, shamefully continued by Labour (several of whose former ministers went on to lead private health businesses.), and accelerated by the Tories (and LibDems since 2010.
By funding the NHS properly, the staff providing such services could be employed by the NHS. But by imposing various restrictive conditions on Health Trusts (in England) and by making crony appointments to Trust boards, the NHS has been put into a position where it’s staffing levels cannot meet demand for patient services so these go to agencies who provide staff. A large proportion of the agency staff are actually NHS employees on second jobs. So, the NHS pays for the hire of these staff, and, on top, pays a premium (or rent) to the agency. The owners of the agency are parasitically removing money from the NHS while not contributing to the NHS.
The agency employees will in many cases have been trained by the NHS and, before that educated in the publicly funded school system. Employees from overseas will have, largely, been trained in their home countries by similar public funding.
Alasdair Macdonald.
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To be fair, there were always agency personnel, at least in the 1970s, mostly NHS nurses looking for a bit extra between change in shifts, but it was nowhere near the scale or scope it is today.
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