An NHS mental health trust plans to cut a wide range of its services and axe hundreds of jobs to close a £25m hole in its finances.
The move by the East London foundation trust (ELFT) and the scale of potential cuts involved have been called unfathomable given demand for NHS mental health support is rising rapidly.
The plan has sparked fears that under-18s and adults needing psychological treatment will have to wait longer or be forced to go private, leading “to lives being destroyed”.
It will involve the “redesign” of at least 10 key services such as child and adolescent mental health care, talking therapies, addiction support, help for adults undergoing a mental health crisis and community programmes, including for ethnic minorities and poor people.
Fothergill ward, a 20-bed intermediate care ward at the trust’s East Ham care centre, has stopped taking new referrals and is scheduled to close on 21 September.
ELFT’s list of where the cuts will hit and how many jobs will be lost shows it plans to shed 330 of its 6,000-strong workforce, about 5% of the total, through a combination of redundancies and the removal of posts.
It said it was seeking £24.97m of cuts because NHS England obliged all of the country’s 205 trusts to balance their books.
Richard Munn, the national officer for health at the trade union Unite, said: “To see cuts to any mental health service is unfathomable and unacceptable. Cutting mental health services will lead to exponentially greater costs to the public purse and lead to lives being destroyed.
“Such extensive cuts to services and staff will inevitably lead to people with acute mental health problems, who need care urgently, facing longer waiting times. The consequence of this will in some cases be tragic, life-changing and irreversible.”
Unite is preparing to ballot its members at ELFT over potential strike action to protest against the cuts and the fact that its lead official at the trust, Mark Dunne, has lost his job as a result of what Munn called “a sham redundancy” that showed the “cold, uncaring nature of this employer”.
ELFT provides mental health care in the east London boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham, and in Luton and Bedford in Bedfordshire.
The Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse, Apsana Begum, has written to ELFT’s chief executive, Lorraine Sunduza, voicing serious concern about the cuts.
Begum asked if the trust had undertaken a risk assessment of its plans, given the likely impact on “public health, public safety and health equalities”.
“I simply cannot envisage that cuts of that scale could be implemented without creating a substantial variation in how services are accessed by patients,” she said. She noted that few of the plans had been announced for consultation, “despite the wide-ranging savings apparently intended” and job losses involved.
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The report of the trust’s finance committee to its most recent board meeting on 23 July did not mention the cuts or £25m savings target, even though they have been planned for weeks, fuelling questions about ELFT’s transparency about such large-scale reductions to services and personnel.
The campaign group Keep Our NHS Public said patients affected may be forced to pay for private care in order to get help quickly.
“Given that many patients with mental health needs already face long delays before getting NHS care, cutting services as dramatically as ELFT proposes will inevitably mean that some of those in dire need of its help will inevitably go private to get the treatment they need”, said the group’s co-chair Dr Tony O’Sullivan.
“The screaming contradiction we see is that while NHS funding for its own trusts is so limited that ELFT has to make £25m of cuts, the Department of Health and NHS England are happy to hand £2.5bn to private firms to expand their capacity to treat NHS patients.”
ELFT said it had not undertaken an impact assessment because “these are indicative savings proposals at an early stage”, even though its list of cuts was accurate as at 7 May. No cuts “will move to implementation without passing through quality impact assessment”, a spokesperson said.
“Like all NHS providers we have a responsibility to live within our means so that we can continue to provide high-quality care to the communities we service, now and in the future. Our approach is clinically led and focused on meeting the needs of our service users. We are working closely with our trade unions, colleagues and partners to identify the most effective and sustainable way to deliver the efficiencies required of us, while protecting the quality and safety of care.”
