by Angela Cole

acole@thekmgroup.co.uk

Patient care will not be compromised as a result of redundancies at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospitals, bosses insist.

Speaking candidly at the NHS trust’s first board meeting since it was revealed 200 posts were to be culled from the 4,000 workforce, chief executive Glenn Douglas made assurances that candidates would be selected carefully.

He described the move to invite applications for redundancy among staff at its two hospitals as “voluntary resignation”.

“It isn’t redundancy, it is voluntary resignation – we are encouraging people who may wish to move on or retire early to express that wish to us and the reality of the situation is that for NHS organisation in terms of the number of people working for us is going to be less than it is this year,” he said.

“We have a challenge in terms of moving our workforce around. That is just one tool of many in order for us to help achieve the national targets.

“As far as frontline staff in terms of any voluntary redundancy go, it would be rather stupid to offer money and financial inducements for key clinical staff at this time.

"it isn’t redundancy, it is voluntary resignation" – glenn douglas, chief executive of maidstone and tunbridge wells hospital trust

“Clearly patient safety and quality are paramount in what we are doing,” he added.

He stressed that change was impossible to avoid due to funding cutbacks.

“The reality of the situation is – and this impinges on the quality to achieve the targets that the NHS has been asked to achieve – you cannot do that for 5% a year less. We have to look to do things differently,” he said.

“We have to cut our cloth.”

Members of the union Staffside were also praised for their “grown-up and mature” approach to the job cut discussions by non executive director Kevin Tallett.

Last week, our sister paper the Kent Messenger reported exclusively how the trust had written to its entire workforce to ask if they wanted to leave with a severance package, the deadline for which is Friday, October 5.

The meeting also heard that the new GP commissioners, who are taking over the running of local health budgets from the PCTs, had forecast a drop of 40 patients a day in A&E at both sites, but this had not materialised.

This had meant the trust had also been forced to take on more temporary staff to cover the extra patient numbers, which proved more expensive.