Many people think using a nursing agency is an expensive way of filling shifts when you’re short, or simply flat out. This is a totally understandable way of thinking since, on face value, you pay more for an agency staff member than you do for your own staff.

But what if we allow for a few of the ‘hidden’ costs or costs that many don’t think of when trying to avoid hiring temporary agency staff? Costs like calculating your staff wages and tax. What about holiday pay? What about allowing for your time to rearrange the roster accommodating for maybe one or two of your staff members?

What if we work things through with you? Let’s consider it took you one hour of extra time to make the roster work. If you allow for that time and the cost involved with holiday pay and wages, the difference between your own staff and using agency staff to fill shifts every so often is very minimal. It may even be more cost effective hiring an agency nurse.

Of course this all depends on the cost difference between what you pay your staff and what an agency costs. If there’s a considerable difference someone may be making a large profit and you’d be better off to spend two or maybe three hours doing some “roster rearranging”. In saying that, if the difference is reasonable, then you’d be better off letting someone else take care of it.

Unfortunately, we can’t give you a fancy chart or figures to show how cost effective it can be to use a nursing agency. To do that we would need to know how much your staff get paid and how much you get paid – that’s just being nosy. What would have been cool is if we had a flash “calculator”, which you could put your figures into and it would show the differences after accounting for everything. Alas, that would cost money, and we’d much rather spend money on giving our team a good end-of-year party. Feel free to work it out yourself though and if you want to know our rates, to see if it would be better for us to handle the odd shift every now and then, get in touch with us.