Agency Nurses - FOI Response Register

1. This year’s most up-to-date figures for the total spend on agency nurses working in both acute settings and in primary care, and also the spend for the previous three years. For ease of collation, figures for each setting and year could be entered into the table below. (Not sure if you organise this data by calendar year or financial year, so the first column gives the option for either – please specify whether it’s calendar or financial year)

2. The total number of shifts worked by agency nurses, with a breakdown by acute and primary care, for the same timeframe. Again, for ease of collation, figures for each setting and year could be entered into the table below.

3. Please provide the highest amount of money paid by the Health Board to an agency nurse for working a single shift within the same timeframe as the questions above (i.e four calendar years or four financial years)

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:

Information regarding the highest amount paid for an agency nurse to cover a single shift is not automatically collected by NHS Shetland and to answer Q3 would require manually reviewing every nursing agency invoice and recording the cost of the shifts in question onto a spreadsheet for comparison.

There are around 1600 relevant invoices per year so over the 4 year period requested this would be around 6400 invoices. We estimate the above process to take an average of 2 minutes per invoice. This would therefore take 6400*2= 12800 minutes or in hours 213.3.

Staff costs are capped at £15.00 per hour so the cost of responding to this would be 15*213.3=£3,199 therefore exceeding £600.

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.

NHS Shetland has begun publishing detailed information on temporary/agency and bank worker expenditure on our website. You can find expenditure figures for Apr 2017-Dec 2022 at the following address: https://www.shb.scot.nhs.uk/board/procurement.asp