Southern Health Trust will seek to 'minimise risk of patient harm' caused through budget cuts
Southern HSC Trust Director of Planning, Performance and Informatics, Elaine Wilson has acknowledged that some degree of uncertainty remains as to whether patients and staff will be impacted by planned budget cuts, however she stressed that any such impact would be constantly reviewed.
Speaking at the Board meeting of the health body on August 27, the senior Trust representative commented: “[We want] to minimise that risk of patient harm with an aim of ensuring that we can continue to reform as we move forward with a focus on the reset panel and neighbourhood model.
“This is not just one year, there will be [savings totalling] 4 per cent this year, potentially 4 per cent next year and the following year.
“We don’t want to do things this year that are so damaging that the reset and the reform that is required would be impossible.
“So, for each of the savings areas that we identified, we assigned a senior responsible officer from the senior leadership team, and their responsibility was to assess the impact of each of these areas and their deliverability, so that we can track it throughout the rest of the year.
“Project initiation documents were developed for each of these and they included an assessment of the risk to patient or staff safety, a risk to clinical effectiveness or staff effectiveness, a risk to patient experience or staff experience, and equality and inclusion impact.
“The other assessment that we carried out was an equality impact screening, and we do have a legal responsibility to carry out equality screening.
“We have done an equality screening of the whole financial plan and then moved into equality screening of the specific workforce control element.
“The workforce control equality screening came back with the conclusion at this point that there would be minor to moderate impact likely.
“However, given the fact that we have not identified all of the posts that would be included in the likes of vacancy control measures, we haven’t been able to identify exactly where that impact might be, and whether actually there is going to be an impact.
“So, we’re going to have to do an ongoing review and look regularly at screening that workforce control as we go throughout.
“I think one of the important things to mention in relation to vacancy control is that this is not a vacancy freeze.
“Because some post is vacant at the minute, we are not deciding that post will not be filled all year. What we’re saying is, there is a possibility of delaying the recruitment on that, in relation to delivering the savings that we need to.
“We know that this is not ideal and we know that there will be an impact in some of these, but we have tried to focus this on services that will not result in patient harm.
“We will be continuing to try and maximise the opportunities to make efficiencies in the areas that do not have that frontline impact.
“We’re also mindful of our obligations in relation to rural needs. The rural needs assessment has been carried out.
“The conclusion at this point is that the implementation of the plan may impact on those service users in rural areas, due to challenges in relation to the savings.
“Again, we will be reviewing that regularly throughout the rest of the year.
“The impact overall will be assessed regularly throughout the coming months and reported to the Chief Executive as part of our RISE (Reform, Innovation, Savings and Efficiencies) programme.
“We are committed to the fact that if we hit a point where it looks like patient harm may occur as a result of some of these savings measures, we will stop, we will mitigate and we will see whether there’s anything else we can do to deliver our savings.
“Any unintended consequences or emerging risks will be identified through reporting arrangements and we will continue to review.
“If evidence emerges that the proposal is having a detrimental impact on patient service users or staff or service quality, then we will review that position.
“As we review the impact, we are committed to the implementation of these savings. It is going to be very challenging, the level of savings [required] is very difficult, but we will constantly review and mitigate against those risks.”