NHS consultant crisis as bosses spend over £674m a year filling up to one in three posts with locums

The NHS faces a consultant crisis with managers forced to spend over £674million a year filling up to one in three posts with locums, a report reveals.

Managers regularly wait over 12 months to secure a candidate, placing a strain on finances and impacting on efforts to cut waiting lists, it adds.

Analysis by BMJ Careers found that nearly 33,000 consultant jobs were listed on the NHS Jobs website between 2022 and 2025 in England and Wales - enough to staff more than 66 large hospitals.

Over a third of these vacancies were in Greater London and the South East and a quarter were for psychiatry positions.

Other in-demand specialties were surgery, paediatrics and radiology.

Data obtained by the medical journal under Freedom of Information laws reveals up to one in three consultant posts lie vacant in some NHS trusts and health boards.

The total spend on consultant locums among the limited number who responded was £674million, meaning the true figure is likely to be even higher.

One resident doctor at a north London trust said: ‘It’s a complete nightmare – the doctors who are left working have to work at 150 per cent, patients have to wait longer to be seen, and by the end of the shift doctors are running on fumes.’

Dr Shanu Datta and Dr Helen Neary, co-chairs of the British Medical Association’s consultants committee, said: ‘Simply put - we do not have enough consultants to meet the needs of patients or run services to the standard they should be.’

Phil Johnson, director of BMJ Careers, said: ‘The word “crisis” can be overused, but at a time when activity is increasing, the new Labour government is pledging to ‘eliminate’ agency spending and slash international recruitment at the same time, it is time to acknowledge a tipping point has been reached.’

An accompanying survey 107 consultants found very few (4 per cent) are actively looking for work, but a substantial minority (47 per cent) were open to changing jobs, despite not ‘actively looking.’

Of those who are open to looking for work or actively looking, a substantial minority said they feel increasingly disillusioned with NHS working conditions and were interested in relocating outside the UK.

BMJ Careers also surveyed 116 recruiting managers about the challenges they face when recruiting consultants.

Half said their need to recruit consultants will increase in the coming year, while 61 per cent said consultant vacancies were having a significant negative impact on waiting times and 54 per cent on quality of care.

Meanwhile, over a quarter (27 per cent) said they regularly or always have to source candidates from overseas to fill difficult consultant vacancies.

An NHS England spokesperson said: ‘While agency spend is at a record low with trusts on track to save £1 billion over two years, we want to go further still.

‘We are working with the government on a 10 Year Health Workforce Plan which will detail the numbers of staff we need now and in the future.’