Of course the BBC will sometimes run with the Conservative narrative if it happens to synch with the BBC’s visceral contempt for private industry. Today they are merrily spinning this story…
The government has announced measures to clamp down on “rip-off” staffing agencies used by the NHS to plug gaps in nursing and doctor rotas. It will set a maximum hourly rate for temps and cap the amount trusts that are struggling financially can spend. The agencies’ body says they are being scapegoated “for the NHS’s own mismanagement of workforce planning”.
The agencies are dead right. No one FORCES the NHS to use their services and as usual when the NHS is questioned it is ALWAYS someone else fault. The BBC like to run this as it paints private enterprise as vultures feeding off our brave and noble NHS. The same NHS which shows a lamentable control of budgets.
“and cap the amount trusts that are struggling financially can spend”
Errrm… doesn’t ‘struggling financially’ tend to impose its own cap? If trusts are already paying more than this maximum hourly rate there’s presumably a good reason – namely that they can’t get a cheaper supply. The article suggests that half the money goes to the agency itself, but surely such a goldmine attracts competitors to undercut them pretty quickly?
I’d suggest we aren’t hearing the whole story here.
Having read the stories in the Daily Mail and with a friend’s daughter, a doctor, receiving very generous payments for extra shifts, I wonder who sets these ridiculous payments. Does a nurse say, ‘I won’t get out of bed for less than £3,000 for this extra shift’? Would the nurse do it for £2,500 for example – both amounts seem obscene to me. And for general nursing, why on earth don’t hospitals run their own bank nursing? Surely it isn’t beyond the wit of man to have some nurses on zero contracts that could be slotted in to wards as required? But nurses are paid £23 per hour (as quoted on Today this morning) – so maybe the problem is their already generous circa £44,000 a year for a 37.5 hour week – my calculations from the Today quoted figure, I could be put right if other posters know otherwise).
Is the £23ph gross or net? If net it seems a tad high …
It is a truism that public bodies always spend the money they are allocated. If they fail to do so they have next years budget reduced. No matter what level one is talking about, whether council, department or section the amount of funding equates to power. The bigger the call on the funding the more power the person in charge has.
No public body will ever be financially efficient until that relationship is broken.
You are so wrong, everybody knows that public sector workers only do their jobs for the good of everybody else and have no interest in personal gain whatsoever.
Unless they are a white policeman in which case they are probably doing it to oppress minorities.
“It is a truism that public bodies always spend the money they are allocated”
Pah, having worked as an NHS manager for 20 years I can tell you that the biggest bollocking I ever received was for coming in underspent. My year end figure was an underspend on £200,000 on a £13,000,000 budget. I’d not long joined the NHS from the private sector and still had the mindset to make the best possible use of resources.
Picking up on Deborah’s point about creating a nursing bank, we had one of those until about 2004. In 2001 the Labour government decided to end the use of agency nurses and doctors and set up NHS Professionals to create an NHS owned “agency”. We were suspicious of its ability to source staff and carried on with our own bank, but were eventually told that we had to close down our own system and use NHS Professionals for all temporary staffing needs. The inevitable result was that when NHS-P couldn’t provide staff we had to obtain them from agencies.
NHS professionals may be more efficient now (although the agency costs suggest that it isn’t), but I can’t comment on that as I left the NHS in 2012.
Just goes to show that these caring and dedicated doctors and nurses we keep hearing about – ad nauseam – can be very, very greedy.
So no questions why we need all these extra staff?
The BBC should be asking this question.
There is a perennial oversubscription of quality British candidates to study medicine and dentistry in Britain with many rejected.
Why then is there always a shortage of trained doctors and dentists which requires to be met from abroad?
There is more than one reason involved, but I know the causes. Can the BBC find out?
At least agency staff ARE required-and if Labour screwed up the market enough to need a reset to prevent Mid-Staffs, then so be it.
It`s the market-and that the NHS is the biggest dinosaur in the rigged markets of New Labour creations(let`s face it-this scandal exploded whilst Labour were in power-especially after 2005)-always needs to be put at Frank Dobsons door…Blunketts and Burnham too(although Milburn DID try to deal with the worst of it-but got rings run round him by the BMA,GMC, RCN etc).
But I digress-any chance of the same NHSophilic BBC turning their water pistols on MPs…who categorically do NOT deserve a 10% pay increase?
This will cause trouble, and Cameron/Tories had better back the people or lose a lot of goodwil for letting MPs buck the market.
The nasty party, LABOUR, does not care about NHS patients, or anyone else.
What the nasty party, LABOUR, cares about, is having the largest number of eligible voters beholden to them. Voters dependant on the Labour party for their (often sinecural) jobs; for their (often disgracefully large) salaries; for their (often grossly inflated) pensions; for their (usually inflated) redundancy payments; for the (highly inflated) fees they receive as consultants after redundancy.
Voters who have little choice but to become union members, and thereby, donators to the Labour Party.
The nasty party, LABOUR, was responsible for the importation of millions of non-whites into the UK. Importations which the indigenes did not need, did not want, and were not consulted about.
The nasty party, LABOUR, wet their collective pants with joy, when, in addition to the disgusting, otiose, aliens from planet Islam; hundreds of thousands of EU citizens flocked to the UK. Here was yet more cannon fodder who might be persuaded to vote nasty party.
The two groups referred to above, and their relatives, purported relatives, or people who could become related to them by marriage (sham, illegal or otherwise) became part of that other public sector. The benefits industry. Another group who could become beholden to the Labour Party.
The Labour Party has a history of treachery to the British people. Their goal has always had a Marxist element. Hence Millibands still feel at home there. They are the enemy and must become an organisation who are spoken about only in the past tense, with the contempt and disgust they deserve.
Death to them all.
Economics is more an art than a science but when I was a student at LSE we were taught – on reflection, I consider, correctly – that a single or overwhelmingly dominant buyer in the market created a monopsony and could exploit the suppliers of goods/services accordingly (much like – but in the other direction – a monopolist exploits consumers of its goods/services). However, it appears that the NHS – undeniably a monopsonist – rather than driving down the price of nurses or doctors sourced via agencies is helpless in the face of agency (non-)power and appears to cough up whatever is demanded.
This inversion of economic theory can be explained by one or both of two factors – incompetence or corruption. I suspect it’s more the former than the latter but both play their part: it’s a public service after all so there’s no need to worry who manages the outfit’s finances or personnel or, indeed, who manages the outfit itself (as long as they vote Labour and fail to tell the punters the truth). The same infections have been caught by the BBC: a public “service” guaranteed an income by force yet perenially moaning about a shortage of cash while grossly overpaying its management and its “star” broadcasters (but not those who do the grunt work who suffer because of the BBC’s effective monopsony).