Admin roles at East Kent Hospitals will be cut with affected staff now in consultation and faced with reapplying for jobs or being redeployed to other roles.
East Kent Hospitals University Foundation Trust, which runs hospitals including QEQM at Margate, has opened a 30 day consultation to ‘standardise’ administrative work.
Trust bosses say they hope to ‘avoid compulsory or voluntary redundancies’ by filling alternative roles.
Trust chief executive Tracey Fletcher said: “We have launched a 30-day staff consultation to standardise administrative functions across the Trust and support the work to improve the Trust’s financial position through challenging ourselves on how we make best use of the resources we have available to us, including a reduction in administrative roles.
“Every effort will be made to avoid compulsory or voluntary redundancies as a result of these changes. We will work with affected staff as we have a number of alternative roles within the organisation that are currently unfilled.
“We have contacted all staff who may be affected. We understand that this is a difficult time for them and we are offering support to our staff.”
In December the trust was running at a deficit of almost £70m. Papers for a meeting of the board of directors on February 2, revealed that by the end of January, the trust deficit had grown to £84m.
At that meeting, acting chairman of the board of directors Stewart Baird said: “There’s a lot of things to fix in this trust we have to prioritise, it’s like boiling an ocean.”
He explained the trust’s priorities are improving waiting times, reducing waiting lists – particularly for cancer treatment – and cutting costs.
New chief finance officer Tim Glenn (pictured) was brought into the trust from Royal Papworth Hospital Trust in Cambridge to help cure the organisation’s financial ills.
By December “we were losing about £10m per month,” Mr Glenn told the board and revealed there would be a new “forecast deficit” of £117.4m by the end of this financial year.
