Hundreds of jobs at Bristol’s biggest hospitals are set to be axed after cash-strapped bosses told staff they need to save a minimum of five per cent from their budget in the next 12 months.
Staff have been told that the number of people working for University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Trust has to be reduced by two per cent – and with a workforce of more than 15,000, that could see more than 300 posts cut.
The bombshell news came in an email to all staff on Thursday from the hospital managing director Prof Stuart Walker, and no department, hospital or unit will be immune from the cuts to budgets and staffing numbers.
Prof Walker reassured staff that they ‘definitely want to avoid’ compulsory redundancies, but may need to consider introducing a ‘mutually agreed resignation scheme’, where people volunteer to leave their jobs but their roles are not necessarily made redundant after they leave.
Hospital bosses said they hope to find the savings from simply not replacing people when they leave – the equivalent of around 100 full time employees leave the trust every month – but they said they will only not fill vacant roles where it’s ‘safe’ to do so.
Prof Walker said the number of full-time jobs at the hospital trust had grown by around 2,000 since the 2020 Covid pandemic, and with many staff working part-time, there are more than 15,000 people employed.
The UHBW trust runs some of the biggest hospitals in the city: The Bristol Royal Infirmary; the Royal Hospital for Children; the Eye Hospital, Ear Hospital and Dental Hospital, as well as South Bristol Hospital, and Weston General, and other clinics and units around the city.
The cuts come as the Government claimed to have reduced hospital waiting times for four months’ running since they were elected in July, but the pressures on NHS budgets from central Government mean bosses at the BRI will have to make savings.
The UHBW Trust has been exploring working more closely with North Bristol NHS Trust, which runs Southmead Hospital, and both trusts now have the same chief executive and board chair.
But on the frontline, staff will increasingly see colleagues who leave aren’t replaced, and fewer agency staff hired to fill gaps, putting further pressure on existing staff.
The trust’s ‘operational and financial plan for 2025-26’ will be discussed at next week’s board meeting, and Prof Walker said it ‘sets out how we will play our part in meeting the national challenge facing the NHS, to reduce its financial impact and deliver a minimum 5% cost improvement programme over the next 12 months’.
The plan will see some investment. Prof Walker told staff there would be an investment of £4 million in tackling ‘critical quality and safety issues’, and there would also be a capital investment of £45 million in maintaining and improving the physical hospital’s infrastructure.
But staffing costs are where the hospital bosses see the scope for meeting the Government’s five per cent cut target.
“Over the last five years our workforce has grown to enable us to meet the demand for our services, particularly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In total our workforce has grown by almost 2,000 additional TEs (whole time equivalents) in that time,” he said.
“Approximately 60 per cent of our spending at UHBW is on our workforce, so we’ll need to review this, balanced with quality and safety. We also know that reducing our total workforce number by around two per cent will help us make the savings that we need to this year,” he added.
“We believe we can manage much of this necessary two per cent reduction by reviewing posts when people leave – approximately 100 WTEs each month – and where safe to do so remove and not backfill the vacant posts, and we’ll be further reducing our use of bank and agency workers too.
“We’re also proposing tighter controls on our recruitment activity for corporate support and non-clinical roles, and we’ll continue working closely with our Hospital Group colleagues at North Bristol NHS Trust looking at joint opportunities for improvement,” he said.
“Recruiting to clinical/patient-facing roles when necessary will continue, and external recruitment will not be affected where UHBW hosts services for a wider network, or where there is external funding relating to a specific post/set of posts. There will be a focus on internal recruitment into roles to ensure colleagues have the opportunity to progress their careers, but this will also be balanced against our need to reduce our total headcount.
“We do recognise the increased pressure this will potentially have and how stretched teams may feel – we will work to mitigate this as best we can, and will review this approach after six months,” he added.
If the hospital bosses can’t make the savings they need by not filling vacancies when people leave, they may ask for volunteers to resign their jobs. “Further down the line, we may need to consider introducing a mutually agreed resignation scheme (MARS), but we definitely want to avoid compulsory redundancies,” said Prof Walker.
Staff have been invited to a question and answer session with Prof Walker later this month to talk about the cuts.