A message for Service Users, Families and Carers about our Finances
You may have heard that the Trust is facing a significant challenge with money. Right now, we are spending more than we have. This has built up over time for different reasons. More people are using our services, we have in the past been paying lots of money for non-NHS inpatient beds, and for things like accommodation for patients who are not able to go home after leaving the hospital. In the past we have also relied too much on expensive agency staff to help out.
We need to make sure we can afford to keep giving high-quality care to everyone who depends on us. Most importantly, we want you to know what we’re doing to fix these issues. We will update this page every quarter with messages to keep your informed about the progress we are making.
Financial Turnaround Update January 2025
In 2025 we continue to work hard to stabilise our Trust’s finances. We announced last year that we were facing a £20 million deficit, due to challenges such as increasing demand for our services, longer stays in our hospitals as well as high expenses on agency and bank staff.
By the end of March 2025, we need to save £600,000 every week. We have already started making progress and saving money, while our focus continue to be on the quality of care we provide.
For example:
- We are working on building substantive teams and reducing vacancies, which has helped reduce the amount of money we spend on agency staff.
- We are making sure that we are accommodating people who need admissions to our services and not purchasing beds in private organisations.
- We are reprioritising our services that receive funding from the NHS.
- We have reduced the amount of money we spend on external venues to virtually nothing.
- We are systematically reviewing anything we pay over £5,000.
- We have completed an independent benchmarking review of all senior corpo-rate services roles to assess how we could operate more efficiently.
Staff have been working hard to focus on how best to make savings and contributed over 200 ideas so far. We are looking to see how we introduce some of them to help reduce costs. Ideas included turning the heating down in very hot offices, more recycling and reducing taxi charges.
David Bradley our Chief Executive wrote to staff saying:
Thank you again to everyone for getting behind this work to get ourselves into a financially sustainable position, ensuring that patient care and the quality of our services remain at the heart of the decisions that we take. We continue to make progress - but recognise that there is still a very long way to go and that our financial position is likely to remain significantly challenged over the next 18-24 months. Sadly, we are not alone as this is a similar picture across the whole of the NHS. Thankfully we do have the opportunity, and vision, to transform our services.
We thank you for your understanding and patience while we navigate these difficult times. Please be reassured that patients, carers and our communities are at the heart of the decisions we make regarding our finances.
Financial Turnaround Update December 2024
You may have heard that the Trust is facing a significant challenge with money. Right now, we are spending more than we have. This has built up over time for different reasons. More people are using our services, we are also paying lots of money for non-NHS inpatient beds, and for things like accommodation for patients who are not able to go home after leaving the hospital. We also rely too much on expensive agency staff to help out.
We need to make sure we can afford to keep giving high-quality care to everyone who depends on us. Most importantly, we want you to know what we’re doing to fix these issues.
To close our £20 million financial gap, we are reviewing everything we spend to find areas where we can improve. We are taking action now to balance our finances and also make long-term improvements. For example, we’re looking at getting better value from our contracts, converting agency and temporary staff into permanent roles, and managing our hospital beds more efficiently.
By doing these things, we can save money and reach our savings goal for 2024/25, all while working to deliver better care for our patients.
Here are some other changes we’re making to save money:
- We are cutting spending on things on renting outside venues. This could save us around £500,000 a year.
- We are putting in new limits on agency overtime, which currently costs us about £250,000 every month.
- We are reviewing senior corporate roles at our Trust to make sure we in line with other similar NHS organisations and have paused hiring for these roles until the review is done.
- We have invited staff to share their ideas—big or small—on how we can save money and make local improvements. So far, we have received over 100 ideas.
Staff are working together to make these changes and help us build a stable future. If we do not keep pushing to spend less, it will make things harder next year, and we really want to avoid that. This is why it is so important for the organisation to reduce spending now before we get too far into the year.
We want you to know that keeping patients safe and making quality care a priority will always be at the heart of any decisions we make. We know that by delivering high quality clinically effective and safe care we can better use our resources to address the deficit. We still have a lot of work ahead, but we’ll keep you updated on how things are going.
