NHS Dumfries and Galloway’s spending on temporary nursing staff increased by 26 per cent last year.
A new report has revealed that the health board paid out an “eye-watering” £20 million on locum workers.
Nearly £13m was spent on medical and dental staff cover – which was up 3.5 per cent on the year before.
The biggest rise was recorded in covering gaps in nursing staff which rocketed from £5.8m in 2021 to £7.3m last year – a jump of 26 per cent.
Dumfriesshire MSP, Oliver Mundell, said: “These eye-watering figures reveal the scale of the staffing crisis at NHS Dumfries and Galloway.
“There is no doubt the failure of the Scottish Government over the past 16 years to train the nurses and doctors we need is fuelling this problem.
“We urgently need to see a long-term strategy to address these issues and a recognition from the SNP in the meantime that rural health boards are facing the brunt of additional costs.”
The figures, produced by NHS Education Scotland, show that the national total for temporary staff topped £560 million.
In 2022/23, NHS Dumfries and Galloway spent £12.7m on temporary medical and dental staff – up from the previous year’s figure of £12.3m, with £7.3m going to nursing staff.
But during that period there was an increase in the number of NHS staff in the region – even though there was a slight fall across Scotland as a whole. At the end of March 2022 there were 3,943.5 whole-time equivalent (WTE) roles in the region, but by the end of March this year that number had risen to 3,961.1.
Nursing and midwifery staff rose from 1,891.8 WTE roles to 1,914.2 with medical and dental going from 316.6 to 325.9.
Unison Scotland’s head of health, Matt McLaughlin, said: “This report confirms that the NHS is in the midst of a staffing crisis and the increased dependency on agency staff to plug gaps is a massive drain on NHS funds – money that would be better spent treating patients and investing in the workforce.
“Our nursing survey last month showed 94 per cent of nurses have experienced understaffing, with almost three quarters saying this happened on a daily basis.”
NHS chief executive Jeff Ace has repeatedly warned of the staffing and financial pressures facing the health board.
In April, he said: “We have a model that we can’t afford at the moment.”
A spokesman for NHS Dumfries and Galloway said: “This is a situation being experienced by
rural boards including NHS Dumfries and Galloway, where permanent recruitment to posts is a continuing and well-documented challenge.
“It is essential that services continue to be delivered, and at present that does mean significant expenditure on temporary staffing across a range of services.
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “The workforce is the most important asset of the NHS and staffing has grown by more than 17 per cent in the last
decade.
“Last year we recruited a record number of trainee doctors, and the number of available medical school places at Scottish universities has increased by 55 per cent in the last eight years.
“These annual figures are the first to show additional staff brought in during the pandemic, such as for Test and Protect services and vaccinations, leaving the workforce.
“New controls have now been put in place and we expect to see agency costs coming down.”
