Almost £1.5million has been spent by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde in just three months on agency staff to plug workforce gaps.

The total eye-watering spend by the SNP over the period between the start of December 2022 and the end of February this year is £26million, Scottish Labour has revealed.

While private agencies reap the benefits of this crisis, the NHS is suffering from at least 7,400 clinical vacancies, with worsening conditions and poor pay often cited as sparking a mass exodus from the workforce.

This crisis has only gotten worse after 16 years of SNP inaction and a lack of investment in the NHS and its workforce.

Between December 2022 and February 2023, at least 34,000 nursing shifts were covered by agency staff, including over 8,600 shifts in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde alone. This is while there are 2,075 nursing and midwifery vacancies (equivalent to 11 percent of posts) across the region. The total bill for agency staff across the health board area which includes Dumbarton, the Vale of Leven, Helensburgh and Lomond reached more than £1.4million for just three months.

Jackie Baillie has repeatedly criticised the cost of the SNP’s mismanagement of Scotland’s NHS and believes that the new Health Secretary, Michael Matheson, has inherited a worsening workforce crisis which needs urgent action.

The Dumbarton constituency MSP said: “This is the true cost of SNP failure.

“A decade and a half of bad choices and inaction from the SNP has caused this dismal situation – one that only got worse during Humza Yousaf’s abysmal stint as Health Secretary.

“While junior doctors are being balloted for strike action over pay, the Scottish taxpayer is being handed this eye-watering bill by private agencies to plug the gaps in the NHS workforce.

“It is concerning that more than 8500 nursing shifts have been covered by agency staff in just three months in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde alone while there are a high number of vacancies in this health board.

“The Scottish Government need to focus on retaining skills and stop letting people walk away from permanent jobs in the health service when their experience is so desperately needed.

“Our NHS will continue to face this crisis as long as staff find themselves overworked and underpaid. Conditions get more challenging every day and all this SNP government has to offer is soundbites.

“The new Health Secretary must prioritise tackling the workforce crisis if we are to truly see recovery in the NHS – we cannot continue to allow the people to Scotland to pay the price of SNP failure.”