East Lancashire Hospitals Trust warned it's running a £26million overspend & needs to urgently reduce costs
The boss of a Lancashire hospital trust has warned it is running a £26million overspend and needs to take steps to ‘reduce costs with immediate effect’.
The chief executive of East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust Martin Hodgson outlined a series of measures to achieve this in a letter to all staff including a freeze on recruitment, an end to non-essential activity and considering scrapping the shuttle bus which takes patients between the Royal Blackburn and Burnley General Hospitals.
His letter says that at the end of October East Lancashire Hospitals trust (ELHT) was overspending by £26m and ‘we are not seeing any reduction’.
Mr Hodgson’s comments come after the the trust revealed 15-hour waits for patients at the Royal Blackburn’s accident and emergency department triggering a ‘red alert’.
His letter to staff says the trust was ‘under a programme of system-level investigation and intervention, with an unequivocal mandate to reduce costs with immediate effect’ and treating the cash crisis as ‘a major incident similar to our response to Covid’.
Mr Hodgson also said the current waiting times at the Royal Blackburn A and E were ‘unacceptable’.
Warning of difficult decisions to make, the cheif exectuvie said the hospital should ‘focus on discharges across every area as a priority, reducing our bed occupancy before Christmas and into the New Year’.
The letter sets out a range of further measures to be adopted by ELHT including:
-a hold all on vacancies for a minimum of 12 weeks with very few exceptions based only on critical requirements
-a stop on all non-essential spending for every team without exception; a pause on non-essential educational activity to reduce costs and enable colleagues to remain in their roles, removing the need for expensive bank or agency cover
-reducing or stopping completely any activity that the trust is not funded for
-and reconsidering any activity not within its core business including likely changes to provision such as the shuttle bus.
A statement from Blackburn and District Trades Union Council said: “The ‘overspend’ at the trust appears to be a good example of how ‘efficiency savings’ are really a sleight of hand expression for inadequate funding – you give with one hand and then take away with the other.
“It is difficult to know at the best of times how to calculate the ‘ideal’ allocation for a service, but the situation gets even worse when what is allocated is chipped away at by other measures.
“Other than the ‘go slow’ on vacancy filling, it is very difficult to pin down what the trust’s ‘expenditure reductions’ will actually amount to – except that the shuttle bus has clearly been put in the firing line again.
“It seems to be a classic case of bosses picking on something they don’t really understand the value of because they have never really understood how helpful it is.”
Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain, who met with ELHT bosses on Friday, said: “This is a huge area of concern for all my constituents, and residents in the areas surrounding Blackburn.
“This situation is not new.“In fact, it is an ongoing situation. I know that the hard-working staff are doing everything they can to assist patients under such difficult circumstances – with the run up to winter not helping.”
Blackburn with Darwen Council’s public health boss Cllr Damian Talbot said: “The trust’s £26m deficit is part of a wider issue across the NHS nationally.
“It is going to have to work really, really hard to tackle it. I have been given assurances by the senior leadership team that patient care and safety is paramount.”
Mr Hodgson’s letter to staff comes against the background of the Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board, which manages the local NHS, seeks to find savings of £530m across the service.
Mr Hodgson said: “I have spoken many times about the pressure on budgets and the need to provide the very best, safe and high-quality services we can, but importantly this has to be within our means too.
“Colleagues know that we are some way off achieving our budget at the moment and that we are re-doubling, if not re-tripling, our efforts at the moment to improve our position.
“It feels like another huge mountain to climb but we can do this.“One way I know we can improve patient safety and experience whilst reduce our costs is to ensure that only those who need to be in hospital are here.“We are now focused on getting as many patients home and there will be huge activity to maximise discharges every single day and night.
“Looking after more patients than we need to, for whatever reason, takes up enormous amounts of both energy and money but the truth is that the issue is a big challenge to patient safety and experience too.
“It is the inability to admit people from urgent and emergency care because others are waiting to be discharged that can result in patients being looked after on corridors.
“My unequivocal view is that it’s unsustainable for colleagues, patients and their families as an operating environment and its unaffordable to boot.”