Consultant at Dudley's Russells Hall Hospital paid £3,608 for ONE shift

The eye-watering amount was paid on December 4 last year – a Sunday – for a 24-hour stint at £150 per hour that included being on call.

It comes as hospital trusts across the West Midlands revealed they spent more than £68 million on temporary staff such as locum doctors and agency nurses.

The Dudley Group, which runs Russells Hall, saw its spending on locum doctors nearly double to £4.3m last year while agency nurses cost £6.2m – up from £4.6m in 2015/16.

Bosses say agency workers and locums are used to ensure patient safety and to cover staff and skills shortages.

The most paid for an agency nurse was £1,847 – roughly £153 – for a 12-hour shift on New Year's Day, which this year was a Sunday.

The trust also paid a specialist doctor £1,507 for a nine-and-a–half hour shift to cover the New Year's bank holiday on January 2 this year.

The amount works out at around £158 per hour.

Dudley Group Trust chief executive Diane Wake said: "To make sure patients are safe and cared for by appropriately skilled clinicians at all times, we sometimes use locum doctors to cover shortages.

"On Sunday, December 4 2016 we had to fill a gap in our acute medicine consultant rota with a locum.

"The payment for this shift would have included – undertaking the daily consultant ward round; any subsequent medical treatment or intervention required as a result; being the on-call acute medicine consultant for 24 hours; taking telephone queries or concerns from the acute medicine on-call team during this period; any on-call visits to hospital to undertake consultant duties during this period

"All requests to fill shifts with locum doctors go through a very stringent process involving senior staff to ensure the cover is needed and appropriate.

"Locum spending is monitored locally by individual departments and the board of directors receives monthly reports on the use of locums.

"We have recently reviewed our processes around the use of locum doctors to make them even more robust in order to reduce spending and make the system more efficient.

"Our use of agency staff will obviously reduce once we are able to fill these posts and we are doing all we can to recruit."

Figures released to the Express & Star under Freedom of Information revealed the Royal Wolverhampton Trust, which runs New Cross and Cannock Chase hospitals, spent £2.9m on locum doctors in 2016/17 and £400,000 on agency nurses.

Meanwhile bosses at the Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust –which runs Sandwell and City Hospitals – revealed they spent £21.3m on agency workers between April 2016 and February this year.

The trusts that run Walsall Manor and County Hospital in Stafford and the Royal Stoke have yet to supplied the figures.

University Hospitals Birmingham, which runs the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, spent £5,630,000 on locum doctors and £6.8m on agency nurses.

The Heart of England trust, which runs Birmingham Heartlands Hospital, Solihull Hospital, Good Hope Hospital and Birmingham Chest Clinic, spent £8.7m on locum doctors and £9.5m on agency nurses.

While Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust spent £13.7m on locum doctors and £6.1m on agency nurses.

Hospitals have become increasingly reliant on locum – or temporary – doctors particularly in busy, understaffed departments such as A&E. Locums' high fees are putting even more pressure on already overwhelmed hospitals, with the NHS spending £1.4billion more than planned on agency staff last year.

Health minister Philip Dunne, the MP for Bridgnorth, criticised agencies for charging the NHS huge amounts.

He said: "This sort of behaviour goes against the principles of our NHS and agencies like these are acting in an entirely unscrupulous manner."

NHS Improvement estimates the health service could save £300m a year if all hospitals stuck to a Government cap on rates for temporary staff.

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust said: "We only use locum staff when absolutely necessary to cover gaps in rotas and/or vacancies whether they be medical or non-medical. We also have a protocol to adhere to when considering the use of temporary locum staff which ensures that need and cost are actively considered.

"The payment made per shift depends on the grade of doctor being covered and the duration of the shift."