Hospitals to scale back agency staff in cost cuts

Hospitals in the Black Country and Staffordshire are stripping back on agency workers as health chiefs struggle to save up to £100 million over the next 12 months.

Stafford, New Cross, Walsall Manor and Sandwell said they were all planning to scale back on the use of temporary staff.

Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals Trust has the biggest savings target to meet in the coming financial year, having to save £25m by the end of March 2013. Spokeswoman Jessamy Kinghorn said the savings amounted to 6.5 per cent of the trust's total budget.

"Reducing the amount we spend on agency staff is one of the ways we plan to do this and there are several things we can do.

"We have our own nurse bank and have set up our own administration bank to fill non-clinical gaps. Reducing sickness absence is another way of reducing the amount we spend on agency staff," she said.

At Stafford Hospital, cutting down on agency staff has formed part of its savings plan as it faces a £20.7m deficit by the end of the month. It emerged last month the cost of using agency workers to fill in for staff off sick at the trust, which also runs the hospital in Cannock, was costing £200,000 a month.

Board papers for Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital, which has to save £15.3m over the next 12 months, reveal the trust has spent just over £3.4m on agency staff since April – down from £3.7m at this point last year.

The decrease has been achieved despite pressures leading to an overspend on the pay budget, including accident and emergency and cancer wards.

Walsall Manor Hospital spokeswoman Annabel Smith said the number of agency staff being used was likely to fall in the following few months after being forced to increase their usage over the winter months due to an outbreak of norovirus.

The hospital has to save £11.6m – and in January, agency staff cost £332,538 of the hospital's £12m monthly pay budget, £28,000 up on December.