NHS: Labour Turnover

(asked on 15th December 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the financial cost to the public purse of staff leaving the NHS to be employed in NHS roles on a contract basis through agencies.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 21st December 2022

No specific estimate has been made. However, the deployment of a flexible workforce allows the National Health Service to meet short term increases in demand and staff can be drawn from internal staff banks or external agencies.

Our policy is to reduce the use of agency staff and to prioritise in-house staff banks. With NHS England, we will continue to monitor expenditure on agency staff and support trusts to develop effective staff banks. Since 2015, we have controlled agency spending through price caps and procurement frameworks and trusts can only override capped agency rates on exceptional patient safety grounds.

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