Trust spends over £600k with consultancy firm

Rochdale Infirmary

The Pennine Acute Hospital Trust – which runs the Rochdale Infirmary – has spent over £600,000 with a leading management consultancy firm in a one month period.

In total the Trust spent £663, 615 with Ernst and Young in August.

On 8 August they paid the consultancy company £419,000 and a week later on 15 August they paid them a further £244,615.

The revelation comes just three months after Rochdale Online revealed that the Trust had spent over £1million in a three month period.

http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/57361/health-trust-spend-over-1million-with-consultancy-firm 

The Trust, which also runs the Royal Oldham Hospital, Fairfield General Hospital and the North Manchester General Hospital, needs to make savings of £45million. The figures come at a time when there could be up to 1,000 job losses in the Trust and services have been taken away from the Rochdale Infirmary.

Health campaigner, Councillor Jean Ashworth, slammed the figures. She said: “This is making a mockery of all these cut backs – why are they not cutting back? Some one needs to step in and stop this farce. It is an absolute farce.”

A spokesperson for Pennine Acute Trust said:“Transforming for Excellence (TfE) is the Trust’s quality improvement and efficiency programme. It is the method through which we aim to transform and improve services to maintain safe, high quality, reliable and sustainable services through this economic downturn and beyond and achieve the necessary cost efficiency savings required.

“We have recently set up a new team in the Trust by seconding members of our own staff to work closely with a team of management consultants from Ernst and Young and with staff in implementing the service transformation and efficiencies required to meet the £43 million cost reductions which the Trust faces this year.

"We understand why some people might question why we are spending money on management consultants when we have a £43m savings target this year, but we believe it is sometimes necessary to spend up front to make larger savings in the long term.

“Other local public service bodies have made use of management consultancy expertise and we are no different. We need additional support, skills and expertise to work alongside our staff to identify where we can transform our services to improve the care we provide and in turn make the necessary savings.

“Using management consultants means that we can get the extra support and skills we need for specific periods of time without the added cost of hiring additional permanent staff. The TfE programme has helped the Trust make huge savings, enabling the Trust’s income and expenditure to balance last year. So far, we have successfully identified £38 million of cost savings opportunities. Without the additional support it is unlikely that we would have been able to do this.

“By working alongside Ernst and Young our own staff are developing the skills necessary to run our own programmes in the future. This is not a resource we will be committing to use on a permanent basis."