A health trust is spending more money on stand-in doctors than any other in the country despite a government pay cap, figures reveal.

Medway NHS Foundation Trust paid its locum doctors millions more in fees, and notched up thousands of extra shifts from the staff it drafted in.

The figures were revealed by Sky News as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.

Medway NHS Foundation Trust, which has recently celebrated exiting “special measures” imposed by care inspectors, employed the stand-in staff for 4,148 shifts, resulting in payments of £4,194,144 during a three month period - more than any other health trust.

Nationwide, the research found that hospitals breached the cap more than 250,000 times in a three month period.

It also revealed that some locum doctors across the country have been paid in excess of £50,000 in just three months, and 46 of the 77 trusts surveyed paid locum doctors via a limited or personal service company.

James Devine, director of human resources organisational development, at Medway NHS Foundation Trust, said: "Our first duty to our community is to ensure that our services are safely staffed.

"There is a national shortage of doctors and nurses across the NHS and unfortunately that means that costs for agency staff can be high; we meet regularly with staffing agencies to negotiate on fees, but our costs for agency staff are still higher than we would like them to be.

"We are working very hard to reduce these costs and make Medway NHS Foundation Trust an employer of choice for clinical staff.

"By engaging with staff currently employed through agencies we have managed to encourage substantial numbers of them – including doctors – move from expensive recruitment agencies into our own bank of flexible, temporary staff.

"We have also been successful in recruiting permanent staff – in January this year we had more than 40 nurses and clinical support workers start working in permanent roles at the Trust.

“We are developing a targeted campaign to recruit senior doctors into permanent roles, and have three dedicated nursing recruitment plans to attract nurses from the UK, Europe and the rest of the world to work at the Trust.

"We are optimistic that with these initiatives, as well as the Trust’s recent improvement in its CQC rating and the lifting of special measures, we will find it easier to recruit into permanent roles and reduce our overall spending on agency staff.

"We have a focused plan for the next 12 months to reduce our overall spend on temporary staffing.”