In reply to Offwidth:
Most Trusts are way over their budgets. In which case there is strength in numbers when cones to dealing with pressure from NHS England to save money.
I get day emails that my Trust is on level 5 alerts, the highest level. Thus and its predecessor system only used to happen in winter. It was know as "winter pressure". Now I there is only pressures, endless and unrelenting.
Despite the £15 million the Trust have spent on management consultants the overspend only ever get bigger. There is a huge increase in highly paid senior roles yet hands on clinical staff are difficult to recruit. We're the biggest user of agency staff in the region.
So called bed blocking is a real problem and a drain on resources. A hospital has to treat everyone who turns up and look after them until there is a safe place for them to discharged. The lack of care homes and other prevision is the cause of a lot of the overspend. Local authorities have a fixed budget for social care and any extra spending cab only be funded by drawing fast declining reserves or saving made elsewhere. Hence the backlog in acute services. Somehow the money being wasted on hospital care for those who don't need it has to be moved into social budgets.
