St Helier Hospital Cuts

The latest cuts proposals from St Helier Hospital Trust indicate over 480 job losses and 208 bed closures. I suspect much of the reduction will be of agency and bank staff and keeping posts vacant as compulsory redundancies are very expensive. The Beds reduction is more serious as it would be more than that proposed in the ill-fated Better Healthcare Closer to Home proposals.

This is a good reason why people should join the Unison organised march on November 25.

It will be interesting to see where these job losses fall at a time when the Trust is reconfiguring jobs across its two main hospital sites. I suspect Epsom may in the end take a bigger loss, which is why the Epsom Campus Development Group has been established to come up with other uses for parts of the site.

Maybe Health Scrutiny can clarify the proposed distribution of posts after the reductions are completed?

In addition the lack of transparancy in Trust finances in the past doesn't give us confidence as to how they will manage their finances in the future. We currently have less detail compared to the PCT Turnaround Plan. Such a lack of information would never be tolerated in local government. Perhaps the local NHS is at last catching up with the financial management that local Council's have? We therefore need more details to be provided to Health Scrutiny Committees.