MORE than £100m has been spent on agency workers and overtime in the last four years by the trust which runs Furness General Hospital.

The figures have been obtained by The Mail following a Freedom of Information Act request.

The average spent by the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust is £27m a year.

In 2017/2018 the trust spent £16.9m on agency workers and £8.7m on bank staff. In the same period the trust's total spend amounted to £356m.

Agency staff are employed by an agency and hired by the trust on a temporary contract. They typically, but not necessarily always, earn more per hour than permanent staff in the same role.

Bank workers can be those who already work for the trust who have opted to work an additional number of hours on top of their contracted hours.

Hospital trusts across England are tasked with reducing the amount spent on agency workers and bosses at UHMBT said the trust had significantly reduced its overall spend.

Director David Wilkinson said: “Patient safety is of paramount importance within our Trust and our main concern is to ensure that we have the appropriate number of clinical staff to meet our patients’ needs.

“In the last two years, we have reduced our agency spend by 37 per cent, which equates to £9.8m. This has been achieved by proactively recruiting permanent staff to fill vacancies.

“We have been working hard to reduce the amount of money spent on agency staff and the current figures reflect this.

“When we have gaps in our rotas we will explore all options but there may be times when we need to employ agency staff to ensure patient safety.

“We now have the equivalent of 27 more doctors in post. This is in addition to recruiting 129 nurses who came to work for the Trust in the past year.

“We still have vacancies in some areas many of which are in areas where, nationally, many other organisations also have difficulties in recruiting as there is a shortage in clinical staff in those specialties."