Agency Staffing - FOI Response Register

For the following questions please only answer regarding agency nurses.

Under FOISA s 12(1), NHS Shetland is not obliged to comply with a request if the estimated cost of doing so exceeds £600. Having reviewed your request, NHS Shetland has determined that the cost of compliance would exceed £600 and so is unable to provide the information requested; we have provided a breakdown of the estimated costs below:

To answer Q6 would require manually reviewing every agency invoice and recording the hourly rate(s) in question onto a spreadsheet for comparison. There are 1475 relevant invoices and we estimate the above process to take an average of 2 minutes per invoice. This would therefore take 1475*2= 2950 minutes or in hours 49.2.

Staff costs are capped at £15.00 per hour so the cost of responding to this would be 15*49.2=£738, therefore exceeding £600.

Note additional staff time would also be require to respond to the other questions.

NHS Shetland may be able to provide a response to a new, narrower request for which the cost of compliance would not exceed the cost threshold. Please let us know if you would like to submit such a request.

This may be achieved by submitting a request covering a narrower range of questions.

1.    For the use of agencies, please can you confirm what framework the trust works under. 

2.    Please can you confirm the list of agencies that have supplied to the trust under the framework through the dates of January 2021 – December 2022, specifically for both Band 6 and 7 requirements. 

3.    For the same 12-month period, please can you provide the list of agencies that have supplied to you outside of the framework, specifically for both Band 6 and 7 requirements. 

4.    Please outline your spend per agency, broken down by grade and speciality of nurse and department for the above time period. 

5.    Please can you confirm on what occasions you would look to go outside of the framework. 

6.    Please can you confirm the highest agency hourly charge rate, and their speciality. 

7.    What contractual relationships are in place for supplying agency nurses and who is responsible for managing them?

8.    Please Can you please provide me with the name, contact number & email address of the person responsible for agreeing temporary nursing agency contracts for your Trust?

Please can you provide details of the names of the decision makers who ultimately decide which agencies the Trust use?