By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor
A total of 2,641 NHS staff were made redundant and then rehired by the NHS in the three years since April 2012.
In total the NHS forked out £92million in redundancy pay to staff who were back working for the NHS not long afterwards, creating a revolving door policy and costing taxpayers’ millions of pounds.
Cameron’s health reforms appear to have contributed to this shocking statistic, it has been claimed by a senior opposition MP. At the top end over that period, the average payoff topped £36,000, which would easily pay a nurse’s salary with a more than a few grand to spare.
As junior doctors are on the verge of an unprecedented strike this news will add to the crisis facing our national health service, already in billions of pounds of debt and becoming increasingly unstable and unsustainable.
Shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander said: “Patients left waiting hours on end in A&E this winter will be rightly furious at these figures.
“If you wanted a symbol of the folly of the NHS reorganisation, then firing and rehiring managers must surely be it.
“On David Cameron’s watch it’s been payoffs for managers and pay cuts for nurses.”
One extreme example is of a married couple who received redundancy payments reaching almost £1million and then moved to new posts in the same hospital less than six months later.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We have introduced tough new rules so that any salaries above the PM’s now have to be scrutinised by the Department and we’re both capping payouts and clawing back redundancy payments when highly-paid staff return to the same part of the public sector within a year.