Revealed: hospitals spend over £20m a year on agency nurses to fill st

Thornbury Nursing Services supplied staff at the cost of £43million last year, charging the NHS as much as £1,800 a shift. The nursing agency, which was once owned by an offshore company,

earned up to £6.5million from individual hospital trusts. The damning figures come just days after Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt slammed expensive staffing agencies for "ripping off the

NHS". Hunt plans to ban unapproved agencies and set a maximum hourly rate for freelance medics, according to the Department of Health. Barts NHS Trust in London spent a staggering

£80million on agency doctors and nurses last year, more than any other NHS trust. And one agency doctor earned £459,000 in 2014 after working an average of 80 hours a week. Dr Peter Carter

of the Royal College of Nursing said that staff are turning to agency work "because the NHS is not paying them enough to make ends meet". Dr Cliff Mann, president of the Royal

College of Emergency Medicine, said A&E doctors are in short supply because they feel "overworked and burned out". He said: "That pushes the prices up and up, so we are

stuck in a locums' market, with hospitals forced into a bidding war." Yesterday it was revealed that a hospital trust is wasting £10,000 a month by allowing staff to take too much

annual leave. The unnamed trust could save up to £750,000 a year by making the best use of staff, according to a review by Lord Patrick Carter.