Nurses: Temporary Employment
(asked on 20th September 2022) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the total number of shifts covered by (a) agency and (b) bank nurses was in NHS England in each of the last five years.
Total number of shifts for bank and agency nurses by year are set out below. Data for bank shifts in 2017/18 is not included as the collection of this data began in 2018/19.
Year | Bank shifts | Agency shifts |
2017/18 | Data not collected | 1,938,238 |
2018/19 | 4,447,491 | 2,175,221 |
2019/20 | 4,767,397 | 2,320,307 |
2020/21 | 4,874,358 | 1,952,481 |
2021/22 | 5,168,634 | 2,252,400 |
The number of full-time equivalent nurses employed directly in Hospital and Community Health Service and General Practice settings has increased by 29,110 (9.7%) since September 2019. To reduce unnecessary expenditure on agency staff in the NHS, in 2015 NHS England introduced measures to bring agency spending under control. Measures involved the introduction of price caps limiting the amount a Trust can pay to an agency for temporary staff. Since then, total spend on agency staffing has fallen by c.£1.2bn per year, from a peak of £3.6bn in 2015/16 to £2.4bn at the end of 20/21.