More than £60 million has been spent on temporary consultant doctors in Dumfries and Galloway over the past five years.
The sum is the highest among Scotland’s fourteen health boards, with nearly £4 million spent on agency nurses over the same period.
South Scotland Labour MSP, Colin Smyth, said: “It is shocking that our region has the highest bill for locum doctors in Scotland since 2019.
“A decade and a half of inaction on workforce planning has caused this dismal shortage of staff in almost every part of the NHS from nurses to surgeons and it means the NHS paying huge sums for locums, which is far more expensive that paying permanent staff. The extra costs means less to spend on other health services and ultimately it is patients that pay the price with longer waiting times.
“As long as staff find themselves overworked and underpaid we will never be able to recruit the NHS workers we need to cut these excessive bills for bringing in locum doctors and agency nurses.
“It is vital that the Scottish Government makes tackling the NHS workforce crisis a top priority so patients can get the care they need from enough staff and we can get better value for money in our health service.”
The figures show that from March 2019 until September 2024, Scotland’s health boards spent more than £400 million on locum consultant doctors.
NHS Dumfries and Galloway – which is aiming to cut £18.3 million from its budget in the current financial year – spent just over £64 million, with more than £4 million spent between April and September last year.
Over the same spell, health boards spent more than £520 million on agency nurses, with Dumfries and Galloway’s share just under £4 million.
An NHS Dumfries and Galloway spokesman said: “Spending on locums has been required across a range of services.
“This is due to ongoing challenges in recruiting to permanent posts, as well as a need to meet the health needs of a growing older population with increasingly complex medical issues.
“Recruitment remains one of our top priorities and we are pursuing a number of initiatives in an effort to reduce the need for as much locum support.
“The board is absolutely committed to ensure that all steps are taken to manage our vacancies across the organisation in a proactive way to ensure that we can deliver our services for the public of Dumfries and Galloway.
“Meanwhile, there are robust processes embedded to ensure that NHS Dumfries and Galloway employs supplementary staff based on necessity for the provision of service, while reducing locum spend is one of the workstreams within the financial recovery programme.”
A Scottish Government spokesman added: “NHS Scotland’s staffing pay bill is over £10 billion a year, with spending on agency nursing a tiny fraction of this.
“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 unplanned absence, sickness and increased unforeseen activity.
“It is however critical that we seek to secure best value whenever we are delivering services within NHS Scotland, allowing us to maximise the impact that our investment has on the quality and availability of patient care.