January 2010

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is preparing plans to meet its financial and performance expectations in 2010 and beyond, as outlined by the Department of Health report 'NHS 2010 – 2015: from Good to great. preventative, people-centred, productive’, which says:

"To keep the NHS moving forward in the next period, services must also be more productive. This will mean change on an unprecedented scale for patients and staff. It will mean hard choices about resources and priorities. We will help people through change, protecting patients and supporting staff. More productive services can and should also mean better services for the public – more preventative and people-centred.

“This will be the greatest challenge the NHS has taken on in its history.”

Within Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, in the financial year 2010 -11 the Trust will need to make savings of £27million, on a budget of £420million. A detailed financial savings plan will be published at the end of March, however, the Trust already knows that it will be taking several steps to make savings by improving efficiency and productivity.

Dr Frank Harsent, Chief Executive, said:

“We’re not alone in being in this position. The national economic climate means that the public sector is going to see reduced levels of resource compared to recent years, though the NHS has received a good settlement relative to other sectors. Sometimes people think that the wider financial climate doesn’t affect the NHS, but it does, and we are now seeing its impact.

“We will be pulling together to improve discharge, reduce length of stay, improve productivity and reduce our emergency admissions. Our aim is to reduce the need for the current level of beds and avoid job losses - which can be achieved if we plan the change now and begin implementation quickly.

“Change is now part of the way we work on a day to day basis. If we don’t adapt and deliver more efficient ways of working, there will be serious consequences. The level of finance coming to the NHS is now known and fixed. We cannot carry on as we always have, no-one can.”

Ahead of the detail of the Financial Savings Plan we know that in 2010/ 11 we must:

• Reduce emergency admissions by over 3000 patients per year

• Improve the flow of patients through our hospitals and discharge from hospital so that patients who are clinically fit to leave hospital can do so without delay, spending on average one day less in hospital which will reduce our need for beds

• Improve productivity

Dr Harsent said:

“Many of the efficiencies and improvements to productivity we are planning are already underway in other parts of the country. If we don’t make these changes there will be serious financial consequences for the Trust.

“It’s right that patients should not be waiting in bed if they are fit and ready to go home, its right that patients shouldn’t experience unnecessary delays in their treatment, it’s right that we shouldn’t have empty slots in our operating theatres and outpatient clinics – it’s those kinds of changes we will be making.”

From April 1st all Trusts have been asked to reduce their emergency admission levels to that of 2008/09, which means that we will need to admit around 3000 fewer patients in 2010/11. We will be working closely with NHS Gloucestershire to identify and implement services which allow patients to be treated in local communities.

The reduction in beds will come about as a result of having fewer emergency patients and reducing the amount of time that patients spend unnecessarily in hospital