OVER £68 million has been spent paying locum doctors and nurses to work in Dumfries and Galloway since 2019.
It this week emerged that in a five year period, NHS Dumfries and Galloway spent £64.3 million on locum consultants, the highest figure in Scotland.
In addition, the bill for agency nurses during the same period was another £3.9 million, of which £1.4 million was paid out in 2022-3 alone.
The shock amounts were obtained by Scottish Labour in Freedom of Information requests.
And South Scotland MSP Colin Smyth believes the full total for the past six years is likely to be higher as he pointed out the figures only covered up to September 2024 before winter pressures hit.
He also flagged up that in the first six months of this financial year, NHS Dumfries and Galloway spent over £4 million on locum consultant doctors.
Commenting, the MSP said: “These figures expose the sheer scale of the workforce crisis our NHS faces and the eye-watering cost of SNP failure in running our health service. It is shocking that our region has the highest bill for locum doctors in Scotland since 2019.
“A decade and a half of inaction on workforce planning has caused this dismal shortage of staff in alwmost every part of the NHS from nurses to surgeons and it means the NHS paying huge sums for locums, which is far more expensive than paying permanent staff. The extra costs means less to spend on other health services and ultimately it is patients that pay the price with longer waiting times.
“As long as staff find themselves overworked and underpaid we will never be able to recruit the NHS workers we need to cut these excessive bills for bringing in locum doctors and agency nurses.
“It is vital that the Scottish Government makes tackling the NHS workforce crisis a top priority so patients can get the care they need from enough staff and we can get better value for money in our health service.”
