St George's Announce Spending Reductions Of £24.5 million & The Closure Of Sixty Beds
On the 26th May 2005 St George's Healthcare NHS Chief Executive Peter Homa announced that based on proposals made by international firm of accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers, the hospital will be imposing spending reductions that will reduce St George's budgets by a massive £24.5 million over the next three years. Unable to rule out redundancies Peter Homa reveals that the major element contained in the package is the closure of sixty beds in one of London's busiest hospitals. Peter Homa's press statement can be found by clicking here.
These reductions are of course completely unjustified as St George's financial problems result not from an inefficient performance of it's staff, but simply because the government has no sensible way of knowing whether the sum of money that is given to any particular hospital is adequate given the services that is being asked to provide. The nonsense of NHS funding is explained in more detail on the Public Accounts Page of this website and I would recommend that you read this page if you wish to know the real reason why the people that St George's serve are now to have their vital health services so outrageously savaged.
Of course I have always maintained that one of the reasons I was dismissed as St George's was for flagging up that the hospital was heading for this sort of financial problem and that the government had to be tackled on the subject of ensuring that St George's was properly funded. Interestingly PricewaterhouseCoopers who have been paid a substantial but undisclosed fee for making recommendations to the current St George's Board on where cuts should be made, were at the time of my dismissal the Trust's External Auditors and far from wanting to indentify and tackle St George's problems at an early stage, as I recommended, were actually critical of me flagging up that St George's had financial problems. There letter confirming this can be read by clicking here.
It gives no pleasure at all to have been proved so right about St George's financial problems and I am only sorry that the local community who depend so heavily on this efficient and first class hospital are going to have to pay the penalty for an NHS failure to recognise that the real problem is the lack of any coherent system to ensure that hospitals are properly and fairly funded. Read what the local press have to say about the issue by clicking here