Jobs at risk

The Trust Board has today received an update on the financial position for 2006/07. Following the publication of the national tariff and pay awards for 2006/07 and the welcome reinstatement of our PFI smoothing payment by the SHA, the previous projection of a £22 million financial shortfall has been reduced to £14.8 million.

The Trust is taking a range of measures to deal with this hugely challenging deficit; careful cost control, service redesign, and reducing an overall pay bill that accounts for 60 per cent of our budget. Naturally, there are very serious concerns about jobs. We believe that if we took no other action to reduce pay and other costs we would need to lose approximately 450 posts during this year.

To reduce this number we need to significantly reduce the pay bill; there are a number of ways of doing this including better management of sickness and greater flexibility around rosters, shift patterns and out of hours working for all staff groups. Inevitably there will also be job losses; we expect that a significant number of these will be lost through normal staff turnover but sadly some redundancies may be inevitable. We will endeavour to minimise these through other measures to reduce pay costs such as those set out above.

Note to editors: As of April 24, 2006, the Trust employs 5,609 staff by head count. The Trust has a history of excellent financial management and has consistently met its statutory responsibility to break-even.