Leading the Shift to Smarter NHS Staffing

The government’s recent announcement signalling potential legislation to end NHS reliance on agency staff underlines the urgency to address how our health service manages its workforce.

Making Every Pound Count

The NHS will always need access to a flexible workforce. Agencies are part of that mix, particularly when sourced through effective direct engagement (DE) models. But it’s unmanaged, last-minute agency spend – outside frameworks, at inflated rates – that often drives up costs and erodes local control.

Trusts must be able to plan and deploy their workforce with greater precision, and that’s where Liaison Workforce supports real change.

Variable Pay: The NHS’s Most Overlooked Lever

Variable pay, including bank and agency spend, represents a major, and often under-optimised, part of NHS expenditure. Yet few organisations have full visibility of how and why this spend occurs.

We help NHS trusts take control of variable pay by:

• Benchmarking rates against local and national market trends
• Identifying savings opportunities
• Setting pay policies that support fairness, fill, and sustainability
• With better data and controls in place, trusts can make informed, strategic decisions – rather than reactive ones.

Going Bank-First, Not Bank-Only

In-house staff banks should be the first option when filling shifts. They offer staff flexibility, familiarity, and often better continuity of care.

However, moving to a bank-first model doesn’t mean removing agencies altogether. It means using agencies strategically, when bank or substantive options are unavailable, and doing so through cost-efficient, compliant methods like DE.

As the only strategic workforce partner to offer bank solutions, collaborative banks, and a National Bank, we help NHS organisations:

• Build strong, engaged staff banks
• Improve fill rates and reduce agency dependency
• Implement smart tech for shift automation and pay control
• Strengthen governance and compliance across all staffing routes

Our TempRE staff bank saves the NHS over £118,000 every day, averaging a total of 4,000 shifts filled each week, whilst our collaborative banks have saved £11,500,000 since 2018/19.

Furthermore, our Liaison National Bank offers the opportunity to make use of established experienced clinicians to fill gaps, ensuring that not only are staffing gaps filled, they’re filled by the UK’s largest bank of retired clinicians, providing workforce support for NHS providers where it’s needed most.

A Shared Goal: A Stronger NHS Workforce

Reducing agency spend by 30% and bank spend by 10% in a single year is a bold challenge, but not an unrealistic one. Liaison Workforce has already helped many NHS clients achieve these kinds of savings while improving staff engagement and patient care. For example, at Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, our bank solution helped the Trust to achieve a 72% reduction in their average monthly agency spend within the first ten months of working with Liaison Workforce, amounting to £360,000 of savings each month.

We believe in practical progress, not disruption. By focusing on getting the right people in the right place, at the right time, and at the right rate, trusts can shift from reactive staffing to strategic workforce management, and deliver lasting value back into frontline services.

We’re ready to support that journey. Find out more about this process in our upcoming blog posts.