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Apr 2023
Harrogate hospital £9m spend on agency staff 'necessary', says trust
Harrogate District Hospital, Lancaster Park Road.
Hospital bosses in Harrogate have said a £9 million spend on agency staff this year was “necessary”.
Earlier this week, the Stray Ferret reported that the hospital had spent £4.1 million more than its target spend for agencies this year.
Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust set a target to spend no more than £473,000 each month on agencies — the equivalent of a maximum of £5.7 million over the year.
The figure covers staffing in areas such as nursing, dental and clinical support staff.
In response to the spend, a spokesperson for the trust said:
“When we experience workforce challenges in our clinical and non-clinical services we will use our bank of nursing staff or the services of relevant recruitment agencies to support staff gaps where necessary. This is an issue faced by all NHS foundation trusts across the country.
“The workforce challenges can be for a variety of reasons, such as when we have vacancies due to colleagues leaving the Trust or being promoted, or staff illness.
“It is important that we maintain a safe level of staff to care for our patients, and this can fluctuate due to circumstance – for instance, over the winter months we generally see a rise in patients with respiratory infections, such as the flu or covid-19, and an increase in the number of patients who cannot be discharged. This will lead to the trust opening more beds to meet demand, which in turn requires additional medical and nursing staff to care for those patients. In such instances, we may need to call on agencies, which can be expensive, but enables our services to continue.
“Whilst the current spend on agency staff across our services is higher than we expected, this has been necessary to ensure we can continue to provide the safest and best possible levels of health care service for our community.”
Read more:
- Harrogate hospital trust spends £9m on agency staff
- NHS places to be lost as Ripon dental practice closure announced
It comes as Alex Sobel, Labour MP for Leeds North West and the party’s shadow environment minister, described Harrogate hospital’s reliance on agencies as “a disgrace”.
He told the House of Commons in February that a constituent called Marjorie Dunn spent just over seven weeks at the hospital last year.
Mr Sobel said:
“In that time she saw NHS nurses leave the service and she was treated predominantly by agency staff — mistreated, I have to say, by agency staff. It is a disgrace.
“When she was eventually moved to a recovery hub run by Leeds City Council she got excellent treatment there.
“She had broken her pelvis and been told she would never walk again, but it was the council physiotherapist who got her up and walking again. Is it not right that we should be supporting local authorities such as Labour-run Leeds to get such facilities as well as the NHS?”
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