Milton Keynes University Hospital Trust spent £3.7m on agency nurses last year

Employing agency nurses cost Milton Keynes University Hospital Trust £3.7million last year, according to a Freedom of Information request.

The trust has revealed it shelled out the huge cost on nurses from private agencies to plug gaps in its workforce.

Agency staff are brought in to cover when there aren’t enough staff on shift, at a far higher cost than those who work full time for the NHS.

Of the 80 Trusts in England responding to Labour’s Freedom of Information request, Milton Keynes spent the most on agency nurses, with Barts Health NHS Trust second, spending over £2.1million and Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust Foundation Trust third, spending £1.7 million.

Milton Keynes had to spend more than six times as much as Northampton on agency nurses, three times as much as Worcestershire, South Warwickshire, North Cumbria, Cornwall and Northumbria, and twice as much as Leeds, Nottingham and Dorset.

In total the NHS has paid £3 billion to agencies who provide doctors and nurses at short notice, a 20% increase compared with last year. Trusts spent a further £6 billion on bank staff, when NHS staff are paid to do temporary shifts, taking the total spent on additional staff to around £9.2 billion.

The NHS currently has 9,000 vacancies for doctors, with a record 133,000 vacancies in total. Despite the shortages, the government this summer cut medical school places by 3,000.

Chris Curtis, Labour’s Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for MK North, said: “Desperate hospitals are forced to pay rip-off fees to agencies, because the

Conservatives have failed to train enough doctors and nurses over the past 12 years.”

Emily Darlington, Labour's Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for MK South, said: “It is infuriating that, while taxpayers are paying over the odds on agency staff, the government has cut medical school places, turning away thousands of straight-A students in England."

Labour have pledged to tackle staff shortages in the NHS by:

> Doubling the number of medical school places

> Training 10,000 nurses and midwives every year

> Doubling the number of district nurses each year

> Provide 5,000 new health visitors.

The plans will be paid for by abolishing non-dom tax status, which allows UK residents to avoid paying taxes here.

We have approached MK Hospital for a comment.