EPSOM and St Helier University Hospitals Trust may be the next to enter the Unsustainable Provider Regime as was triggered for South London Healthcare Trust in July.
This follows the collapse last month of formal talks aimed at merging the trust’s Epsom site with Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals Foundation Trust.
The Health Service Journal (HSJ) has reported that the Epsom and St Helier trust is now being seriously considered for the same treatment as South London Healthcare Trust which is being dissolved with Lewisham A&E marked down for closure.
At a meeting on October 25, NHS London suspended the merger process for Epsom and said ‘urgent discussions’ were taking place about the trust’s future.
The decision is believed to be linked to the decision to indefinitely suspend consultation on the Better Services, Better Value plans for health services in the five boroughs of south west London.
These plans, which recommended axing services at St Helier Hospital, were halted after NHS Surrey said it wanted to be more involved in decisions about the area.
Epsom and St Helier trust is predicting a £19m deficit in 2012-13.
Ashford and St Peter’s NHS trust chief executive Andrew Liles last month said if his trust merged with Epsom, it would be unable to break even within five years.
St George’s Healthcare Trust withdrew their takeover bid for St Helier in January.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that private health conglomerate Circle’s original business plan for its running of Hinchingbrooke Healthcare Trust outlined a cut in the hospital’s workforce of 20 per cent.
The original business case document published last month said Circle had anticipated cutting its then 1,600 workforce by around 320 whole time equivalents, although this information was left out of the publicly available copy of the paper.
Circle has since said it is unable to say how many jobs would be cut in reality or how much would need to be saved.
The trust currently has 1,433 staff and has cut 77 posts through redundancies this year. The larger 1,600 headcount figure relates to the scenario Circle was given when it made its initial business case prior to taking charge.
Circle, which last month posted a £4.1m budget deficit, was chosen as the preferred partner to run Hinchingbrooke in November 2010.
