The latest hospital trust to announce staff cuts, St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust, has said it plans to axe up to 150 jobs.
The trust, which runs St George’s Hospital in Tooting, south London, has been told by the Department of Health it has to make an extra £10m of cuts to balance its books.
Announcing plans to also cut consultants’ hours in order to save £1.2m, the trust claimed services to patients would be ‘unaffected’.
The latest cuts come on top of £19m ‘savings’ already planned for 2006-7.
St George’s cut its workforce by 300 posts last year.
In north London, trust bosses have announced they are considering axing 320 jobs at Chase Farm Hospital near Enfield in a bid to save £25m.
UNISON branch secretary Peter Simmonds warned cuts of that scale ‘would put people’s lives in danger’.
He added: ‘The hospital is being run like a factory.
‘We are already short of staff and staff are already being pulled to bits.’
Meanwhile, the head of NHS managers’ body, the NHS Confederation, is advocating slashing thousands of hospital beds.
Dr Gill Morgan said yesterday that ‘there are a lot of beds that could still go’.
She complained that 70 per cent of people are dying in hospital, adding that ‘far more people would prefer to die at home if we could offer them good care’.
Morgan said: ‘We won’t be able to make these changes and invest in the community unless people start to abandon the idea that beds are sacred. They are just a piece of furniture, that’s all.’
Morgan was speaking ahead of today’s launch of an NHS Confederation report titled ‘Why we need fewer hospital beds’.
It outlines seven areas of care where it claims beds could be cut to improve services.
The report recommendations include:
• offering more chemotherapy at home to cancer sufferers;
• minor surgery being performed in GP clinics rather than in hospitals;
• patients with chronic conditions being given help to treat themselves;
• some patients being looked after at home by emergency paramedics rather than being taken to hospital.
Elsewhere, the government is attempting to rein in some of the biggest Private Finance Initiative (PFI) hospital schemes as they threaten to run £4bn over budget.
Two PFI projects have already been abandoned – the huge Paddington, west London, project and the Whipps Cross PFI scheme in north London.
A National Audit Office report said the Paddington scheme should have been abandoned two years earlier, or new plans drawn up.
Yesterday, the right-wing Reform think tank urged that overspend PFI schemes should be abandoned.