Scottish Conservative and Unionist MSP for Central Scotland, Graham Simpson, says the amount being spent by NHS Lanarkshire on bank and agency staff is “deeply concerning.”
Mr Simpsons comments come after new statistics revealed that the overall spending on bank and agency staff by NHS Scotland has soared to £567 million.
The figures 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 Lanarkshire a total of £48.4 million was spent on bank and agency staff in 2022/23, while a further £10.1 million was spent on locum staff.
This represented a rise of 49.7% from the previous year, while the locum spend also represented a 14.3% rise.
The figures also dwarf the £22 million spent in 2014/15.
Mr Simpson 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.
He added that the surging figures in NHS Lanarkshire are a shameful reflection of the SNP’s workforce planning and mismanagement.
Scottish Conservative and Unionist MSP, Graham Simpson said: “These deeply concerning figures highlight where our NHS is going wrong under the SNP.
“The seemingly unstoppable rise in spending on agency staff in Lanarkshire 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 the region and I thank them for the work they do.
“However, due to the SNP’s failure to recruit enough permanent staff in Lanarkshire there is an ever-increasing reliance on expensive 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 Lanarkshire to ensure that we can get the modern, efficient and local health service patients and staff deserve”.
