Nursing agencies have hit out against ‘sensationalist’ and ‘distorted’ press coverage of an Audit Commission report on temporary nurses in the NHS.

The report, ‘Brief encounters: getting the best from temporary nursing staff’, published on 5 September, said that private nursing agencies are costing the NHS millions of pounds a year, with the amount spent on temporary nurses rising by 20% to a record £810m in England and Wales in 1999/2000.

But newspaper reports that private nursing agencies are ‘holding the NHS to ransom’ are ‘quite extraordinary and seriously distorted’, said Bill McClimont, head of the nurses and carers division of the REC. ‘The report was actually extremely positive and had very few criticisms of agencies except for one or two that operate with inflated rates.’

CEO of Thornbury Nursing Services Robert Murgatroyd agreed: ‘Agency nurses are critical to the continuing operation of our health service. The majority of agencies operating in this sector are professional, concerned organisations.’

Pay levels were also put under scrutiny. ‘The issue of pay is a bit of a smoke-screen. The vast majority of agency nurses working in the NHS are paid at broadly the same rate that the NHS would normally pay,’ McClimont said. ‘Most of the money spent on temporary nurses is money that would be spent on permanent staff if they had them,’ he added.

The commission pointed out the value of good working relationships, proper contracting and a partnership approach with agencies, McClimont added, ‘and noted the savings that NHS trusts could make by working that way’. Its criticisms focused on slack checks on nurses’ qualification by in-house nurse banks rather than those run by private agencies and poor induction procedures for temporary nurses in NHS hospitals.

Fewer than one in five trusts currently uses a computerised bank management system - where an IT system is used the cost per shift filled is 10% lower. ‘There is serious lack of investment by the NHS in the area of IT,’ said Kevin Mannion, COO of software provider Netengines. ‘This is an arena where private companies could very successfully work with the NHS to make operations more efficient.’