Health secretary Wes Streeting says the NHS needs to “spend money more wisely” after an east London trust was told to make £60m in cuts.
In late April, chief executive Matthew Trainer said Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Trust (BHRUT) had been instructed to make the cuts after already saving £30m two years in a row.
He warned it would be a “very, very hard year” and the cuts would take the trust – which oversees Queen’s Hospital in Romford and King George Hospital in Goodmayes – into “radically new territory”.
This paper previously reported it will mean axing more than 700 jobs and restricting access to care for patients, at a time when attendance was increasing by double-digit rates.
“Some of the changes are about making the system more efficient, more productive and spending taxpayers’ money more wisely,” Mr Streeting told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).
He was speaking during a visit to King George Hospital last week – a centre many of his Ilford North constituents rely on.
He said he had been told they were “delivering better outcomes for patients and better value for taxpayers’ money by reforming the way they work".
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Mr Streeting said “radical” moves under the Labour government included the abolition of NHS England, which leads the NHS, and cutting down on management layers in integrated care boards, which oversee funding for hospitals and centres.
He said these “difficult and unpopular decisions” allowed the government to put “record levels of investment” into the NHS, with £26billion going in this year.
He added: “We felt it was necessary to invest in our NHS, but with that investment has to come reform.”
The trust would have to “restrict access to certain services in a way that we think will cause the least harm as an outcome,” Mr Trainer said.
BHRUT will also look to save £7.5m by cutting 115 corporate jobs, and a further £35m by employing fewer bank and agency workers.
“I think we’ve tried to do kind of ‘more for less’ for years,” the chief executive said. “This is about less for less in some instances as well.”
Streeting was visiting the hospital last week to open a new one-stop urology clinic.
He said in a statement issued after the visit: “We are seeing our local trust, BHRUT, actually outperforming others in north east London because of the approach they’re taking, not just to investing in services, but also reforming the way they work.
“That chimes so strongly with what I want, not just as a local MP for our local residents, but as the health secretary taking the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS, and we’re definitely seeing some of the best of the NHS here.”
