The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), reports the Northern Echo, has called into question the Government’s pledge to invest in frontline services, claiming that there is no evidence of this so far and that while efficiency savings are required, the speed at which redundancies are due to start occurring is very concerning.
NHS Trusts in the North East will see nurses loosing their jobs from as early as 11th October in order to help meet the £800m efficiency savings by 2014. The RCN highlights that in addition to these redundancies taking place a lot sooner than people thought, there is at present no information on how Trusts are to benefit from frontline spending.
A spokesman for the RCN said: “The Government says that these cuts are being made so that the money can be ploughed back into frontline services. The question we are asking is – where exactly is the money going? We need to see the evidence that the money being saved is going back to the frontline, but so far we do not have that information.”
Without keeping staff informed, the Government risks creating resistance from the NHS, as all they are seeing from the changes is the negative impact – there is currently nothing positive being promoted. This issue of communicating with staff is just as important within Trusts as it is on a national scale. Each NHS Trust has its own individual targets and to make sure these are achieved finance directors will be forced to make many tough decisions that will affect the working lives of all medical staff.
Finance directors need to be working alongside consultants to calculate where cost saving can be made without having a detrimental effect on patient experience. Ardentia’s patient level costing solution, promotes this very approach, with finance directors being provided with a detailed breakdown of exactly where costs are incurred for each patient, with users being able to drill down to the smallest details, such as how many minutes the patient remained in surgery. With this information to hand, finance directors can consult with clinicians to assess which parts of treatment are vital to the patient’s care and which can look to be made more efficient. This communication is vital if the NHS is to achieve a more efficient and effective service without resulting in a divided workforce and poor patient experience.
