Mackey: 'We dropped a clanger' on agency staff rules

In February, NHS Improvement announced rules to prevent trusts from using agency staff who are also employed by the NHS, but then said it was “pausing” the policy last week after the Royal College of Nursing warned it could drive more nurses to work in the private sector.

In an interview with HSJ, Mr Mackey said: “I saw one of the comments in your esteemed journal and somebody said we should do this in a more co-production sort of way

“We should, we just didn’t have time. It’s my fault, I didn’t read every line of the document and then eventually did read it and thought ‘oh poop, I wish I’d read that bit’.

“What I wanted was to follow the principles of the junior doctors deal, when we said you can work elsewhere but try to offer that to your local employer first. That’s what I would want the nurses to do. We’ll try to do it properly now and engage with the Royal College of Nursing, etcetera.

“We’re trying to foster this thing about being a learning organisation and every time we drop a bollock we get slaughtered. There’s something really bizarre in all of that. We dropped a clanger but we fixed it.

Some substantive NHS staff top up their income by working shifts through a staffing agency, which can often attract lucrative pay rates. The new rules were intended to force these workers to carry out extra shifts through internal “staff banks”, which the RCN says typically pay 20 per cent less than agencies.