UK hospitals to shed staff to rescue NHS

Hospitals in the UK have been told to shed staff to rescue the National Health Service from an acute funding crisis.

The decision taken by the Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority (TDA) comes almost three years after the UK’s cabinet ministers ordered hospitals to do the opposite.

Critics say the move could force the hospitals to shed hundreds of staff to balance their books, leaving nurses and managers at the risk of being sacked.

According to the Guardian, Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, for example, has been losing £1.2m a week during 2015-16 and could end the year £60m in deficit. St George’s hospital in south London is also expected to record a deficit of about £46.2m. Meanwhile, some of the hospital trusts that are most in the red have been told to use “headcount reduction” to reduce their deficit for 2015-16.

The decision was announced in a letter Monitor and the TDA sent on 15 January to every one of the 241 NHS trusts they supervise. It outlined the measures they needed to be taking to try and make their books balance.

As it was expected, the letter has sparked harsh criticism.

Labor’s Heidi Alexander, the shadow Health Secretary, said: “At the last election, the Tories promised to ensure hospitals had enough staff to meet patient demand. However, less than a year later they’re asking hospitals to draw up plans to reduce staff numbers.”

Howard Catton, the Royal College of Nursing’s Director of Policy, said: “Patients will suffer without the right number of skilled and experienced frontline staff in place. Fewer staff dealing with more patients will only lead to longer and completely preventable hospital stays, and patients will feel the impact of not having the right number of skilled and experienced frontline staff in place.”

“This is an ideological issue and has nothing to do with money as the current government is seeking to privatize the NHS,” a London-based expert, Ivor Kellock told Press TV.

The Finance & Wealth Management expert went on saying that the policies of the government would destroy the NHS and this would have dire consequences for the UK society.

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