Trust still spending millions on locums

The health authority revealed expenditure on middle grade and junior doctors stood at £3,291,532.

The highest usage of locums by speciality was in Accident and Emergency (A&E) with an £832,524 spend.

This was followed by Medicine (£617,195); Surgery (£524,647); Paediatrics (£522,308); Anaesthetics (£437,594); Obstetrics & Gynaecology (229,400); and Psychiatry (£127,864).

The Trust also provided a figure for expenditure on Agency Consultant Doctors in 2011/12.

This stood at £1,765,342.

A separate figure for the use of agency doctors in A&E showed the Trust spent £151,738 at Altnagelvin and £910,596 in the Erne Hospital - £1,062,334 in total.

Last month the Sentinel reported how the Western Trust spent over £10m on locum doctors between 2009 and 2012, an improvement on the £25m spent in the 2007 to 2011 period.

Health Minister Edwin Poots revealed that between 2008 and 2012 the Trust spent £10,535,000 on locums, which was less than the Belfast Trust.

In 2011 a Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) report revealed the cost of expensive locum cover in the Western Trust accounted for almost 17 per cent of medical staffing - double the NI average and the highest locum bill in the province - between 2007 and 2011.

New immigration rules, introduced in February 2008, restricted the number of overseas doctors eligible to work in the UK and were blamed for the costs increase with the NIAO saying the Trust’s reliance on International Medical Graduates (IMGs) had been partly replaced by a disproportionate use of locum cover.