How Hospitals Can Survive the Budgets Cuts

Civitas, 10 August 2009

England’s 115 foundation trust hospitals have been told by Monitor, the organisation responsible for their regulation, that the three-year budget forecasts they submitted are overly optimistic, considering the NHS’s tightened funding in the coming years. They have now been given until the end of September to re-submit their financial plans.

Here are some ideas we’ve been discussing over the last few weeks, and I hope hospitals might consider similar solutions:

•    Limit the use of expensive, external management consultants, and invest instead in the already committed, capable staff you hired.

•    Find ways to discourage constant leadership turnover; save money on severance packages and months of recruitment while maintaining staff confidence in the organisation.

•    Have a process (and the necessary organisational values) in place to enable whistleblowing. Catch patient safety issues early before they escalate into expensive, embarrassing problems.

•    Develop trusting, mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with commissioners. They may be more willing to help out when hard times come around again.

•    Attract patients by monitoring and responding to patient experience and making full use of the opinions of lay board members (for FTs) and the wider community.

Let’s build on this. How else do you think NHS hospitals and foundation trusts can reduce costs?