By Adams Postans
A second major Bristol hospital trust has announced hundreds of jobs will be axed to balance the books following government cuts.
North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT), which runs Southmead Hospital, will reduce its staff by 211 posts to help achieve £40million of savings in 2025/26.
It follows reports last week that University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Trust (UHBW) needs to shed at least 300 employees, which it hopes to do by not replacing vacancies when workers leave.
Both trusts are looking to avoid compulsory redundancies.
A report to a joint board meeting of the newly named Bristol NHS Group, which comprises the two organisations, revealed UHBW was required to make £53million of savings in the new financial year.
It said the proportion of cost reductions directed by NHS England was the same for both – five per cent of turnover.
UHBW chief financial officer Neil Kemsley told the meeting on Tuesday, April 8, that this was at the lower end of the spectrum for trusts in the South West who had been told to slash budgets by between five and 11 per cent.
The report said that along with the 211 NBT job cuts, there would be a 30 per cent reduction in spending on agency staff.
In total the workforce would go down by two per cent.One of the government’s aims is to return hospital employee levels much closer to before covid when the workforce increased massively.
The board’s report said national planning guidance in January made clear that NHS organisations must live within their means.
It said: “The focus is to maximise resources available for clinical services, given the financial constraints, which may result in difficult decisions being required, including reducing or stopping spending on some services and functions and to achieve unprecedented productivity growth in others.
“National planning guidance for workforce sets out clear expectations to reduce workforce cost and whole-time equivalent and for workforce to contribute towards improving productivity.
“There is a risk that headcount reduction and efficiencies across the acute sector result in periods of significant organisational change across our workforce and the potential need to make difficult decisions regarding recruitment into vacancies and the potential for redundancies.
“We have robust organisational change policies and procedures to support this, and every effort will be made to avoid redundancies, and we are already working closely with partner organisations and prioritising redeployment across our services wherever possible.”
The report said the number of staff would increase where the money had already been found, including the £50million elective surgical centre opening at Southmead Hospital this spring that will enable an extra 6,500 operations a year across Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset.
NBT hospital managing director Glyn Howells said: “Delivering the best possible value for the public purse is an important part of the decisions we make as a publicly funded organisation.
“We’re planning on the delivery of savings of five per cent of our overall budget, and part of this are schemes that will see us reducing our workforce by two per cent.
“We expect to deliver these reductions through not backfilling vacant corporate and other non-clinical posts when people leave, where it is safe to do so, and by continuing to reduce spending on temporary and agency staffing.
“We will continue to recruit to clinical and patient-facing roles as necessary, and will keep safety and quality at the heart of all we do.”
The trusts’ joint chair Ingrid Barker told the meeting: “We are in a fairly unique position with two boards in the same locality who are able to deliver plans that are financially breakeven and which meet national performance expectations.
“That’s really worth noting because not every board in the country will be sitting around such positive plans, which is not to say that there will not be difficulty.”
The job cuts were included in the organisations’ 2025/26 operating plans submitted to NHS England last month.