Murdo says the amount being spent by NHS Fife on bank and agency staff is “eye-watering.”
His 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% 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 Fife, a total of £44.7 million was spent on bank, agency and locum staff in 2022/23. This represented a rise of 45.9% from the previous year. The figures also dwarf the £14.6 million spent in 2014/15.
Murdo 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 Fife are a shameful reflection of the SNP’s workforce planning and mismanagement.
Commenting, Murdo Fraser said: “These shocking figures highlight where our NHS in Fife is going wrong under the SNP. The seemingly unstoppable rise in spending on agency staff in NHS Fife 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 NHS Fife and I thank them for the work they do. However, due to the SNP’s failure to recruit enough permanent staff in the region, there is an ever-increasing reliance on expensive agency staff.
“Every penny is a prisoner given the huge demand on services in NHS Fife so we can’t afford to spend ever-increasing sums on agency staff.”
Murdo continued: “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 Fife to ensure that we can get the modern, efficient and local health service patients and staff in NHS Fife deserve.”
