Trust tells its nurses to save £2.50 a day

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Staff at a cash-strapped NHS trust have been ordered to make an extraordinary series of penny-pinching cutbacks.

Doctors and nurses have been told they each must save £2.50 a day by measures such as prescribing cheaper medicines, reducing the number of sterile packs used, cutting hospital tests and asking patients to bring drugs in from home.

The astonishing edict was sent by e-mail to around 3,600 staff working in the West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust by chief executive David Law on Wednesday.

The leaked e-mail, entitled Saving £2.50, contains 13 suggestions to cut costs. Other measures include switching off lights and asking patients to pay for a taxi home instead of using ambulances.

The sum of £2.50 would barely pay for a packet of over-the-counter painkillers or a box of plasters.

Opposition MPs last night demanded an urgent inquiry, while patients groups warned that the cutbacks would have terrible consequences for patient care and the battle to halt the rise in hospital superbugs such as MRSA.

West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which serves around half a million people, posted a £27 million deficit last year – bringing its total debt to £41 million.

One of its flagship hospitals, Hemel Hempstead General, is facing closure and 750 job cuts have already been announced in the area.

Mr Law's email, which has been handed to the Daily Mail, says: "If everybody in the trust saves £2.50 a day until the end of March, we will achieve our financial target for the year.

"Please find attached some suggestions about how this will be achieved."

Conservative MP Mike Penning, who uncovered the email, said: "When I read it I was almost is tears. To see the NHS, which was once the pride of this country and the envy of the world, reduced to begging staff for a couple of pounds is heartbreaking.

"It is a degrading and disgusting legacy of this Labour Government. I would expect most of these desperate proposals to be in effect across the NHS anyway. It beggars belief that nurses and doctors are being asked to take these penny-pinching measures."

Staff have been threatened with the sack for whistleblowing. But one employee took the risk of leaking the memo after being shocked by its contents.

The suggestion to reduce the number of sterile packs comes days after a Department of Health memo admitted that the superbug Clostridium difficile is now endemic in hospitals.

It also warned that the NHS is not on track to meet its target of halving MRSA rates by April 2008.

Michael Summers, of the Patients Association, said: "This e-mail is utter desperation. Some of these measures make sense, but some are quite worrying.

"Reducing diagnostic tests is unacceptable. Patients have to wait long enough to get these tests and sterilisation packs are necessary if we are to have any hope of reducing hospital-acquired infections.

"The patients who are in most need of getting an ambulance to take them home are usually the elderly and they can ill afford to pay for a taxi."

NHS trusts across the country are facing the threat of hospital closures, job losses and cutbacks to services after the Health Service finished the year more than £500 million in debt.

A spokesman for the trust said: "This is all about good housekeeping. The trust has made huge steps forward to reducing its deficit – saving somewhere in excess of £12 million this year."

She insisted patient care would not be affected, adding: "This is about putting an end to unnecessary waste, such as ordering repeated diagnostic tests or opening a sterile box and not using the contents.

"These measures are not going to infringe on clinical safety."

 

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