NURSES’ leaders revealed today that the current 2,000 registered nurse vacancies in NHS Wales cost the service £142 million in agency cover. 

The Royal College of Nurses (RCN) Cymru published its 2024 edition of Nursing in Numbers — its flagship report on the state of the nursing workforce in Wales — revealing that NHS Wales health boards have 2,000 registered nurse vacancies in 2024.

RCN said the vacancies increase NHS Wales’s reliance on temporary agency staff, which cost taxpayers £142m in 2023-24. 

The report also reveals nurses work an extra 73,651 additional hours on top of their contracts every week, equivalent to NHS Wales employing 1,964 extra full-time nurses.

RCN Wales’s Helen Whyley said: “Our findings sound a clear warning and they also show the way forward.

“To start to tackle this problem, nursing staff need to be paid fairly for the work they do.”

Ms Whyley said that if the Health and Social Care Secretary “wants to make a difference to patients, these are the issues he must focus on.”

“There is a strong link between shortages of registered nurses and increased patient mortality, with some research putting the increase as high as 41 per cent,” she said.

“Nursing is a brilliant, skilled, complex career but when the personal cost gets too great, nurses leave.”

RCN Wales members rejected a 5.5 per cent pay offer from the Welsh government earlier this week, demanding talks to improve pay.

A Welsh government spokesperson said: “We remain committed to providing the NHS with the workforce it needs, and this year we are investing £281m to increase the number of training places.”