Agency Reliance Reduced by 50% Through Effective Staff Bank Partnership

With oversight of the entire medical staffing function including temporary, bank and permanent recruitment, onsite teams can accurately analyse demand and adopt a much more measured and sustainable, approach to ongoing medical staffing shortages 

Director of Workforce Solutions

The Challenge

A large NHS organisation in Wales was facing ongoing workforce challenges across its medical and allied health professional workforce. Like many health systems across Wales, it needed to manage persistent vacancies, increasing service demand and the practical difficulties of recruiting clinicians into geographically dispersed and hard-to-reach locations.

Continued reliance on temporary staffing was essential to maintain service continuity, but the organisation wanted greater visibility, control and value from its workforce supply chain while strengthening its staff bank and reducing unnecessary agency reliance. Supported by a growing focus on workforce sustainability, the Health Board sought a more integrated approach to temporary staffing management.

The Approach

A dedicated onsite team implemented a new approach to staff bank and temporary workforce management, working closely with key stakeholders to embed new processes, strengthen governance and support effective change management.

To maximise engagement, staff bank promotion campaigns were run across multiple hospital sites, providing face-to-face support, app demonstrations, training sessions and regular workforce engagement activities. This helped rapidly grow the bank workforce and encouraging greater participation from the existing substantive workforce.

Targeted attraction and retention initiatives were also introduced to strengthen workforce sustainability. Particular emphasis was placed on recruiting bank-only workers, re-engaging clinicians leaving substantive roles, and retaining valuable talent within the Health Board's flexible workforce.

Results

The partnership delivered £4.5m of recurring annual savings while maintaining consistently high fill rates across medical and AHP services.

Enhanced staff banks increased the available pool of clinicians and improved workforce utilisation, supported by greater flexibility for staff to work across multiple specialties and sites.

More robust authorisation processes strengthened governance and significantly reduced escalations, while targeted permanent and bank recruitment activity helped reduce reliance on long-term agency staffing in key services.