Multi-million-pound investment in Emergency Department staffing

25.06.2026

The Board has today approved an additional recurrent investment of up to *£6.6m for permanent doctors, nurses, and healthcare support workers across our three Emergency Departments. This significant investment will reduce our current reliance on bank, locum and agency staff, ensuring that we have a stable, skilled, and sufficiently resourced workforce in place to safely manage demand, provide more timely assessment and treatment, and deliver dignified care.

Crucially, it will also help to improve the morale and wellbeing of our hard-working Emergency Department staff, who face high levels of fatigue and burnout as a result of the significant and sustained pressure they face on a daily basis. I want to pay tribute to their unwavering commitment to delivering the best possible care for our patients in incredibly challenging circumstances. The Board remains fully committed to doing everything it can to support them.

This essential investment will help to stabilise our Emergency Departments, as we continue to work with partners across the health and social care system to address the underlying challenges of restricted patient flow and limited capacity, which remain the principal causes of prolonged waiting times, delayed ambulance handovers, and overcrowding within our EDs.

The decision has been taken following consideration of a detailed business case, developed over recent months, which examines the sustainability of our current staffing arrangements. This investment alone will not resolve all challenges within our Emergency Departments. However, it is a critical enabler of wider system improvement.

Carol Shillabeer - Chief Executive.

*This is made up of £2.7 million that had been held in reserve, pending completion of the ED Business Case, along with a further £3.9m approved during the Board's meeting on 25th June 2026.