SICK medical staff mean our mental health wards are understaffed, costing the NHS thousands every month and causing standards of care to slip, according to a “disappointing” new report.

Bosses at Worcestershire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust are having to pay up to £50,000 a month for agency and bank staff to cover shifts because regular staff are sick and job vacancies are unfilled.

The trust manages key mental health services in Worcestershire, including Newtown Hospital and the psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) in Worcester which provides care for some of the most vulnerable people with mental illness in the county. Bank staff are people on the NHS payroll who can be called on in times of need to cover extra shifts and agency staff are health workers from a private company.

A report discussed at a board meeting of the trust at Hill Crest in Quinneys Lane, Redditch, on Wednesday showed that up to five people a week are off on every ward, every single week, and each week up to 100 shifts are lost to sickness absence.

Some individuals are off at least one day every month of the year while the age profile of workers at the trust is also raising concern with 64 per cent of staff just 10 years from retirement. Jan Ditheridge, the trust’s chief operating officer, said: “This is a chronic problem. We have managed to maintain safety on our wards but not some of the more developmental and creative work we would like to do and perhaps we have not always had the time we should have had to listen as much as patients would require. Financially it is also causing us a problem.

“We cannot leave these vacancies open. We have to cover those shifts so we are using bank and agency staff workers which can be particularly expensive. It is hitting us in terms of the level of quality we would like to deliver.”

Mrs Ditheridge has visited staff to give a presentation on the effect of sickness absence and said many were shocked by the figures published in her report. She said: “We will have to be more robust around the way we deal with sickness absence. We cannot continue to support levels of sickness of this magnitude.”

Dr Ros Keeton, the trust’s chief executive, said: “I am very disappointed and it is disappointing for our clients in primary care and general practice, particularly at a time when more people want this service. We know the effects of unemployment on mental wellbeing. At a time when people are going to demanding more service, we are not going to be able to deliver what we originally aspired to.”

l Your Worcester News reporter was the only member of the media present at this meeting.