Over £2.7m spent on agency nurses at Musgrove Park Hospital already this year

In the first six months of the year, Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, has spent more than £2.7m of taxpayers’ money employing agency staff.

It mean the total has already doubled the £1.2m spent last year, according to information from a Freedom of Information request by the Royal College of Nursing.

Musgrove says it is down to a national shortage of nurses, but that they aim to be in a sustainable position by the end of the financial year.

One Taunton nurse, who left Musgrove earlier this year to join an agency, said she was earning more than double her pay now.

The mum-of-three, who wished to remain anonymous, worked at Musgrove for two years.

She said: “I never thought that I would leave the hospital to join an agency, it was something I said I would never do because I felt like I would be selling out, but when you’re working night and day with people who are getting double what you are, yet not doing half the stuff you are, it does make you take a step back.

“When I worked at the hospital I was on £11.37 an hour but now my starting rate at the agency I work for is £25 an hour. You then get bonuses for working night shifts and weekends.

“Sometimes I’m getting £63 an hour, compared to the £18/19 I would have got at the hospital for working nights or weekends.”

Thornbury Nursing Services - one of the agencies which reportedly supplies nurses to Musgrove - offers staff up to £93.50 an hour, if they are specialist nurses and work bank holidays.

That excludes the fee the agency gets, and it’s all money which comes from the trust and taxpayers.

No one from Thornbury was available for comment.

Hayley Peters, acting director of nursing and governance at the trust, said: “This is a matter that we take very seriously as our continual priority is to ensure that we are providing safe, high quality care to all our patients.

“It is well recognised that there is, and has been for some time, a national shortage of nurses and we started to see this impact on our need to use more agency nurses at the end of 2014.

“We recognised this shortfall and have been working hard on the package we can offer nurses to encourage them to come to Musgrove Park Hospital.

“We have been focussing on support and well-being, as well as training development, and this has proven successful in recruiting nurses both from this country and overseas.

“We are now beginning to see the benefits of this recruitment in reducing our need for agency staffing and aim to be in a sustainable position by the end of the financial year.”

The anonymous nurse said she was working a large number of night shifts and weekends when working for the trust.

She added: “You’re supposed to have one in four weekends off, but that wasn’t happening.

“I was hardly seeing my children and I had had enough.

“When I was there, I saw a lot of nurses leave and join agencies or go to nursing homes because the pay was better.

“If the government had just agreed to give us a 10 per cent pay rise, I don’t think hospitals would be spending so much on agency staff and they would be saving more.”

Jeannett Martin, regional director for the South West region, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said: “There is a recruitment crisis in nursing.

“Not enough nurses are being trained and many are choosing to leave the NHS - to retire early; to work for agencies which offer more flexible hours or to move abroad where nurses are better rewarded.”

In June, health secretary Jeremy Hunt unveiled plans to cap rates paid to agency nursing staff, followed by other clinical, medical and management and administrative staff.

He said: “The path to safer, more compassionate care is the same as the path to lower costs.

Simon Stevens said the NHS needed an extra £8 billion by 2020 and the government has invested that.”