An NHS primary care trust with a budget of £650m has been forced to announce cuts which will mean non-emergency surgery in local hospitals being barred to patients for a month.
Some treatments, including in vitro fertilisation, will be stopped until next year, and operations such as hip replacements will be cancelled.
South West Essex trust will overspend this financial year by £53m, a sum that represents 8% of resources and is “among the largest in scale in England”.
The funding gap will delay operations and bar patients from access to reproductive medical services. More than 200 staff in the trust will lose their jobs and another 400 staff, campaigners say, will go in the local hospital in Basildon.
The trust admitted patients would have to “wait a little longer”. But it said that while difficulty conceiving a baby was “distressing for people who want to have a family”, that situation was “not a life threatening condition”. Senior management said they were bound by its statutory duty to “financially break even” by the end of March 2011.
Andrew Pike, chief executive of NHS South West Essex, said: “We now have no choice other than to tackle this head on. We need to decisively reduce our spending and, regrettably, this will have a direct impact on … patients, staff and partners.”
Patients would no longer get more than a month’s supply of drugs, he said, and some public health campaigns, such as the plan to mass-mail chlamydia self-test kits, had been dropped. “We spend around £56m of public money each year on medicine in south-west Essex,” said Pike. “We estimate that around 10% of medicine is wasted and around 43% is unused.” There were also deep cuts in HIV programmes and mental health services.
Unions called the move a “panic measure”. Nick Bradley, of Unison, said: “Our fear is that some of the more vulnerable patients and members of public will suffer the most as a result of these cutbacks. Basically, you are closing a hospital for a month to pay for the mismanagement by the trust.”
Experts said they were “shocked” by the scale of the trust’s proposals, and pointed out that suggested they presented a political challenge to the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, as he pushed health service reforms.
“I have never heard anything like it,” said Zack Cooper, a health economist at the London School of Economics. “Patients in Basildon cannot access IVF, but in London they can. I think this is going to be a real sore for the government. The other problem is that hospitals will face having to pay staff while not getting any income because they have been forced to close their doors to patients. It’s a little crazy.”
The Department of Health said tonight: “SW Essex has put these plans in place because of local financial challenges, not as a result of white paper reforms.”
Although the health service has been promised a “real terms” rise in financing, the demands on primary care trusts often exceed resources, and with the necessity to balance the books now legally binding, many are taking drastic steps. Last month NHS London recommended “temporarily” closing the A&E and maternity units at Queen Mary’s hospital, Sidcup, because the units would be unsafe to run in the winter when inpatient numbers rose.
Last week hospitals in the north-west of England were given a list of procedures no longer to be carried out on the NHS; these included surgery for mild varicose veins, breast augmentation and hair loss. The reason given was a £10m deficit which forced NHS Oldham to axe operations.
John Healey, the shadow secretary for health, said that since May this year there had been at least 30 cases where hospitals had taken decisions that had led to, or would cause, the closure or downgrading of A&E services and maternity units.
The Guardian UK