Revealed: Millions spent on temporary hospital staff in just three months

Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust spent the sum in the first quarter of 2015.

The trust, which runs Sandwell Hospital, City Hospital in Birmingham and Rowley Regis Hospital, admitted the level of spending was much higher than planned.

A total of £1 million was spent on doctors and £2.6 million on nursing and care staff in the three months up to April.

However, the trust's finance director Tony Waite said it needed to spend the cash so it could cover absences and had struggled to fill jobs.

The spending comes despite efforts to curb agency spending at the end of 2014.

According to a statement in a hospital report, the agency spend was 'significantly in excess of plan and not consistent with delivery of key financial targets'.

"Appropriate actions are being progressed to address this and to reduce the forward pay bill to sustainable levels," the document states.

"Principal overspending is for healthcare assistants providing enhanced care support to vulnerable patients.

"The trust is currently running with a social care ward staffed by agency which was budgeted for permanent staff.

"Spend on scientific and therapeutic staff and on management and admin is below plan."

Mr Waite added: "The trust is committed to providing safe, high-quality and cost-effective care.

"To ensure we achieve this, we, like every other trust, needs to use agency staff.

"In the three months to April this year the trust spent £4.4m on agency staff - of this £1m was spent on doctors and £2.6m on nursing and care.

"Although this is higher than anticipated, it was necessary due to the trust having some hard to fill posts, peaks in service demand and to cover temporary absence such as sickness.

"We are working hard to recruit staff to fill our vacancies and reduce our levels of sickness absence.

"To do so, we are focused on supporting our staff through a range of health and wellbeing initiatives and are proactively carrying out a number of activities to attract talented people to work for us.

"The plan to lower our agency spend reflects that the trust sees having a fully established substantive workforce as being best and consistent with its commitment to providing safe, high quality and cost effective care."

In a report to the NHS Trust board, which met on Thursday, figures revealed the trust's total workforce of 6,833 whole-time equivalent staff members was 109 less than planned - despite it including 254 agency staff.