From the BBC:
... the pay packets of some NHS senior managers will also be trimmed. Currently, more than a fifth of all directors in the NHS earn more than £142,500 - the amount the Prime Minister is paid. Mr Hunt is asking Trust bosses to justify why.
Mr Hunt said: "The NHS is a public service and needs to show restraint on handing out generous pay packages as a matter of course.
"Expensive staffing agencies are quite simply ripping off the NHS. It's outrageous that taxpayers are being taken for a ride by companies charging up to £3,500 a shift for a doctor. The NHS is bigger than all of these companies, so we'll use that bargaining power to drive down rates and beat them at their own game."
Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, has said the rising costs are partly due to hospitals putting more nurses on wards, following the public inquiry into the Stafford Hospital scandal. Others blame government mismanagement of the NHS.
I'm not sure that the NHS is "being ripped off" so much as "chucking money down the toilet", so Hunt is being generous to them. If you need permanent staff, then employ permanent staff; and to the extent that they have to balance out peaks and troughs, there is no earthly reason why the NHS can have its own pool of nurses in each area, it can't be rocket science to co-ordinate this.
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