NHS Ayrshire & Arran has been forced to spend nearly £15.5 million on locum nursing costs over the last five years, new figures show.
And nationally, the bill for locum nurses across Scotland almost doubled in one year – from around £47m to over £92m between 2020/21 to 2021/22.
The figures are contained in a Freedom of Information request which was obtained by Scottish Labour.
And the eye-watering costs suggest an increasing reliance on locum nurses to cover shifts, often at large cost, while nursing and midwifery vacancies continue to increase.
The total spend for Ayrshire and Arran in the last five financial years is £15,475,698.
And in the last two financial years alone, the region's health board almost doubled its spend from £3,509,755 in 2020/21 to £6,697,461 (2021/22).
The figures were met with dismay by South Scotland Labour MSP Colin Smyth.
He said: “These figures show what we all know: that our fantastic and hard-working NHS is facing a terrible recruitment crisis.
“Our health boards clearly have no other option other than to rely on locum nurses, but it is not a long-term solution. The NHS cannot continue to operate like this.
“This recruitment crisis has happened because of 15 years of SNP government mismanagement and a complete failure to train enough frontline NHS staff.
“Anyone looking at these locum figures can see that this is an unsustainable way to manage NHS staffing.
“By failing to train then recruit permanent staff through attractive pay and conditions, the SNP government has forced our NHS to become an addict to short-term staffing fixes.”
He added: “This is an expensive sticking plaster that highlights the endemic lack of long-term strategy from the health minister [Humza Yousaf].”
However, a Scottish Government spokesperson said the spend on agency nursing “remains low” and is less than one per cent of the total NHS spend.
They continued: “The use of temporary staff in an organisation as large and complex as NHS Scotland will always be required to ensure vital service provision during times of planned and unplanned absences such as annual, maternity and sick leave.
“The majority of these shifts are filled from the NHS Staff Bank, who are NHS staff, on NHS contracts at NHS rates of pay.
“We have over 35,000 nurses and 2,900 doctors registered through the NHS Staff Bank.”
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