Trust confirms up to 1,000 jobs will be lost

The Pennine Acute Hospital Trust which runs Rochdale Infirmary, Fairfield Hospital,  Royal Oldham Hospital and North Manchester General Hospital has confirmed that up to 1,000 jobs will be lost.

The Trust met last night (Thursday 24 February 2011) to discuss its budget for 2011/12.

Staff have been briefed today on the savings required. The Trust has to make savings of £45million.

John Saxby, chief executive of The Pennine Acute Trust, said: “Around 70 per cent of our expenditure is on staffing costs. We are therefore informing our Trades Unions of our need to reduce posts across the Trust by a significant number during 2011/12 and we are also affirming our commitment to work through the impact of that with them.

“The reduction could mean that the Trust has to lose up to as many as 1,000 posts from its total staffing complement of approximately 10,000.

“The Trust has never had to resort to compulsory redundancies in the past as a way of balancing its budget and I do not see any reason why we would need to resort to such measures now.

“We still have a reasonable level of natural turnover of staff in any one year. We will therefore set out to manage any reduction in posts by redeploying staff into vacancies.
“Where we are incurring costs for temporary staff we will seek to redeploy permanent staff into those posts. We will also reduce overtime wherever possible so that permanent staff can be redeployed to work those hours. I sincerely expect that at the end of this process everyone who wishes to continue to work for the Trust will still be with us.”

Mr Saxby concluded: ““The scale of the financial challenge facing us is unprecedented, and I understand that individual members of staff may be concerned about their own future.

“As we work through the next year to secure the future for our permanent staff I do not underestimate the personal challenges some people will face in adapting to new roles, new locations and new colleagues.

“We will be as supportive as possible and will make sure that we are as clear and prompt in our communications as we can be.”