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NHS locum rates rise as agency commission falls

July 14, 2016  /   No Comments

In 2015/16, the NHS’s hourly pay rates across all grades of locum staff increased, even as agency commission fell.

This is one of the findings from the third annual Taking the Temperature report produced by Liaison, the largest review of NHS spending on medical locums. It further illustrates the scale of the challenge to rein in the annual cost of temporary staff that totalled £3.7 billion last year.

It also revealed that the introduction of rate caps by NHS Improvement to cut the cost of locum staff have begun to make a positive impact saving some £300 million in the year, but locum staff remain in high demand which means they can command, and receive, high rates of pay.

In 39% of locum bookings made during the twelve months, pay rates agreed between a trust or board and agency were manually overridden, a 16% increase on the previous year. Overrides due to the need for a specialist locum accounted for a significant proportion of the overspend, suggesting that the NHS is suffering an acute shortage of specially-trained substantive workers and are having to rely on expensive locums in order to fill shifts and meet demand.

Andrew Armitage, Managing Director of Liaison, commented on the findings:

“This year we have seen that there are some positive signs. The downwards movement in agency commission rates shows that agencies’ fees are dropping. However, the locums’ hourly pay rates remain high and are, in many cases, increasing year on year. This indicates that it is the agencies that are bearing much of the initial impact of the rate caps while the workers continue to demand and receive the rates they ask for as the shortfall in substantive staff and specialist skills within the NHS continues to exert operational pressures. 

“From our quarterly analyses, we’ve also observed that overall rates have decreased across most grades since the introduction of the caps in November. Without this intervention, the year-on-year increase is likely to have been significantly higher.”

He added that a drive towards greater self-sufficiency in solving staffing issues, including the strengthening of internal staff banks and regional collaboration, was “significant.” The NHS, he said, was “on the right journey but it was a difficult path.” 

 

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