WHILE most voters welcome the principle of extra cash for the health service, hard questions need to be asked as to where that money goes. Yesterday came the revelation that agency hospital doctors can earn as much as £2,000 for a single shift.

Now a local insight into the enormous sums paid to some NHS staff is provided by the case of hospital manager Sandy Spencer.

She earned £145,000 for just five months’ work at Southend Hospital, the equivalent of almost £350,000 a year. Mrs Spencer is one of a number of managers who specialise in short-term, interim appointments, rather than permanent positions.

Many doctors and nurses have chosen the same path, which gives them both more money, and more freedom to work as and when they wish.

This is great for the doctors and nurses involved. But it is not so great for the health service, faced with paying sums that are far in excess of establishment rates. At a time when Southend Hospital has a £9.8million deficit, and some cancer patients are denied potentially life-saving drugs on the grounds of expense, the imbalance seems morally wrong.

A succession of measures have been introduced by successive governments to try to cure the NHS of its dependency on agency staff, but hospitals continue to wrestle with the dilemma. The fact is that the NHS has become, in some quarters, a cash cow.

Politicians and voters alike have to ask this question: Does throwing more money at the NHS actually make the problem worse?