£2.6m must be saved to meet Shropshire hospitals' target
Hospital chiefs in Shropshire are having to find more than £2.6 million in savings by March as the trust battles to meet tough financial targets.
The revelation comes as bosses at the county’s main hospitals in Shrewsbury and Telford enter talks with nurses about proposals for them to work 12-and-a-half-hour shifts instead of the eight hours that most currently work.
Managers of Telford’s Princess Royal and the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital are battling to meet tough savings targets before the end of the financial year.
The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals NHS Trust is required to save £1.9 million before next April.
But a report to trust board members reveals the trust reported a £788,000 deficit in the first half of the year.
It says: “In reporting a deficit, it is clear that the working assumptions adopted in constructing the budget for the 2012/13 year have altered substantially.”
The report also confirms the trust is failing to meet targets on accident and emergency waiting times.
The news comes after it emerged last week that the trust is consulting with nurses over working longer shifts, set to begin in March.
The changes would affect about 650 nurses and healthcare support workers across about 20 wards at the hospitals.
The trust’s financial position and performance will be considered when the board meets on Thursday.
Comments for: "£2.6m must be saved to meet Shropshire hospitals' target"
mike
so the managers cock up and the nurses have to get them out of the stuf that comes out of the back of cows .the managers took the nurses breakes of them so if im ill i do not want a nurse dead on her feet looking after me this is not about patient care but money and the people of shropshire will have to pay
Roger
If the Tories claim they are spending more on the NHS why does the hospital trust need to make savings? Who is setting these targets? Who will decide how to accomplish this? The Hospitals or will it be devolved to the GP commissioning panels? If the treatment is not available from the hospital will the GP's be forced to buy services from the private sector to fill the gap? Where is the extra money?
Are all the bits of the Tory party plan to privatise the NHS all in place now so that it will happen because the GPs (Private sector contractors them selves) have been suckered into doing the dirty work for the government who will say - We put more into the NHS and the GPs decided where to spend it ???????
It is not clever, it is transparent and we all know this is about privatisation of health to the benefit of the private health sector, Tory sponsors. The Electorate will not forgive them.
The hospitals themselves will continue to be flooded with geriatric patients requiring admission because of the effects of cuts to their incomes and support services. Malnourished and hypothermic. No meals on wheels, can’t afford the heating, less visits so forced to do more for them selves causing falls and accidents. Of course the hospitals are over budget because they are over stretched. The reorganisation did not address the basic problem of managing demand because they can’t turn away the ambulances, they just get more stretched in A & E and fail their targets – unavoidable.
Politically they were never expected to manage targets or budgets; otherwise they could not be made bankrupt and sold off to the private sector. But fortunately 2015 is not far off now and they are going to have to think about votes soon. It takes a long time to bankrupt a hospital and sell it off. They have started with the ones they loaded up with PFI debt and have their pilot running now. Hopefully we are not amongst the early targets.
Peter
Perhaps time to follow the lead from Wales, and farm the NHS-paid for Hospital Chaplains out to a Chaplaincy Charitable Trust, thus conserving NHS funds for medical and nursing interventions only.