Health service staff in Scotland are working more overtime to help the service cope, according to new figures.
Nurses put in almost 700,000 extra hours on top of their normal working day in the first half of the current financial year.
Doctors logged in excess of 40,000 additional hours over the same period.
This led to a combined overtime bill of around £17 million. If the trend continues the final total for 2012-13 will be higher than last year.
Winter illnesses have put Scotland's hospitals under particular pressure in recent weeks and staff at all levels are said to have been working late.
Scottish Labour's health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie, who revealed the figures, said: "The longer our doctors and nurses work, the more likely they are to make mistakes. I am concerned health boards are failing to recruit the right number of staff they need.
"What's worse is when you rely on overtime, you end up paying more.
"In the first six months of this year alone, nurses have worked over one million extra hours at a cost of almost £11m – and that's before the annual winter strain takes its toll. This can't make sense financially."
A Scottish Government spokesman said: "Our figures show that, in 2012, nurses worked less than six hours' overtime each at a cost of £122. For the same period medical staff worked four hours' overtime at a cost of £179.
"All territorial health boards across Scotland are seeing an increase in services funding over the next two years and will see a 3.3% funding boost next year to £9.1 billion – that's 1.3% above the rate of inflation. There are more medical professionals working in our NHS than in 2006."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article