A RECRUITMENT agency was paid £21,000 for the appointment of the temporary chief executive at the Royal Blackburn and Burnley General hospitals, in what one campaigner has called a ‘slap in the face’ for frontline staff.

Data obtained by the Lancashire Telegraph has revealed the amount that East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (ELHT) paid to Hunter Healthcare for the services of respected interim chief Jim Birrell, who was in charge of the troubled trust from January to September this year.

MORE TOP STORIES:

It comes as the trust struggles to find savings of about £15million this year, and thousands of staff remain furious about the government’s refusal to award an across-the-board pay rise of one per cent, having taken strike action last week.

ELHT said the fee represented 15 per cent of Mr Birrell’s £177,000 annual salary, saying this was a ‘standard’ cost for such appointments.

Russ McLean, chairman of the Pennine Lancashire Patient Voices Group, said: “The NHS is having to make cuts here, there and everywhere and I’m shocked to hear the trust have paid that amount to an agency.

“There can’t be too many people in the country who were capable of doing that role, so you’d think that with NHS support, there could have been a direct approach to avoid these fees.

“I think it’s a smack in the face for those who work on the frontine.” The Lancashire Telegraph requested the figure through a Freedom of Information request in early June, to which the trust should have provided details within the statutory time limit of 21 working days, but it failed to respond. Two reminders were sent in September, but the information has only now been released after the Telegraph lodged a formal complaint. Mr McLean said: “The trust have told us there’s been a culture change and everything they’re doing now is open and transparent, but when you ask difficult questions they seem to get very defensive at best, and at worst they just ignore you.”

Sean Gibson, regional organiser for the Unison union, said: “People are increasingly worried about private firms extracting profit from our NHS following the government’s top-down reorganisation. The £21,000 paid out to a private recruitment company by the trust would have been enough to pay the starting salary of a Band 5 nurse.”

Mr Birrell, a former chief executive at Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, was paid the equivalent of an annual salary of £177,000 during his nine months as interim boss, during which he oversaw some significant improvements and led the trust out of special measures. This was about £7,000 more than the salary of the new CEO Kevin McGee, who is being paid £169,875 per year, which is an increase of between three and six per cent on the salary paid to former permanent chief Mark Brearley during 2012/13. Mr Brearley was paid between £160,000 and £165,000.

Peter Tucker, a director of executive recruitment agency, Novo, agreed with the trust that a 15 per cent agency fee for an interim chief executive ‘sounds pretty standard’.

ELHT said in a statement: “The chief executive of the organisation is one of the most important appointments that the board can make (and) the recent history of the trust is well known. Jim Birrell, a highly respected interim chief executive with a proven track record in similar short term appointments, was recruited in January, 2014.”

The trust apologised for the failure to respond to the initial Freedom of Information request, and said this was an error.