THE acting chief executive of the Vale of Aylesbury Primary Care Trust has stressed patient care is the priority as attempts to reduce a deficit of £18 million for the county's new primary care trust gather pace.
From October 1, the Vale of Aylesbury, Chiltern and South Bucks and Wycombe primary care trusts will merge into a single organisation which will start life £18 million in the red.
A number of cuts to services including community nursing and healt
h visiting teams, speech and language therapy and chiropody have been proposed to reduce this deficit. A 45-day staff consultation period on the cuts finished last week and senior management figures met yesterday (Tuesday) to consider the responses and begin to draw up final proposals. They have pledged to keep The Bucks Herald fully informed of any service changes.
Lynda Lake-Stewart said although commitments would be made about the future of healthcare services, it was vital to reduce the deficit as quickly as possible.
She said: "This doesn't take away our financial problems - nobody has given us £18 million. It is imperative to get us back into balance and we have to reconfigure services within the restrictions we have actually got and deliver the best care possible with the resources we have."
Mrs Lake-Stewart said she was confident that Janet Fitzgerald, the chief executive of the new primary care trust, was the right person to lead the new trust and her aim is to have dealt with the deficit in 18 months time.
She said: "She led a PCT in West Berkshire that was in balance for five years and is hopeful that Bucks can do the same. The area had a similar population and budget to us."
Mrs Lake-Stewart said any service changes need to be backed up with evidence and said they will have to contribute towards the financial recovery plan. If the redesign goes ahead, PCT bosses will be required to consult with Bucks County Council's overview and scrutiny committee for public health services which is likely to order a 90-day public consultation period. If BCC is still unhappy after this has concluded, they may request health secretary Patricia Hewitt to examine the proposals.
Mrs Lake-Stewart said any delay on the service redesigns would increase the need for them to be implemented. She also denied that the proposals were going against national policy of trying to treat more people in community and not hospital environments.
She said: "These proposals are not just about what district nurses do. We are trying to treat more outpatients with community care and this means not putting more people into hospital beds when things could be treated in different ways."
The future is also uncertain for senior management figures. A separate consultation into a management restructure is also being carried out and bosses, including Mrs Lake-Stewart, face the prospect of having to apply for jobs in the new organisation.
She said: "This is part of life as a senior manager and I hope any money saved from this managerial slimming down will be put back into frontline services."
Mrs Lake-Stewart appealed to members of the public to consider the situation from every angle.
She said: "We are still spending more than £500 million on health care in Bucks. We generally have access to good primary healthcare services, hospital services and mental health services as well as having a healthy population. We don't wait a long time generally for treatment. The public could also consider taking some responsibility for their own health and ease the demands on the healthcare system. All our services are being challenged to help reduce the deficit."
This was first published in The Bucks Herald on September 20, 2006
