BY MARK McKELVEY

The Western Health Trust say they will do all they can to avoid any enforced redundancies or closure of services as it revealed how it intends to make a £37 million savings over the course of the next three years.

All public sector organisations have been told they must make an annual 3% efficiency savings target for each of the next three years as part of an Assembly approved Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR).

To meet these targets, the Chief Executive of the Western Trust, Elaine Way revealed last week that there will by a reduction of 132 administration and clerical posts which equates to one in four of the current admin positions.

"It is 132 posts rather than 132 jobs," said Mrs Way. "We currently employ 12,500 staff, but we are absolutely committed to doing all that we can to avoid compulsory redundancies and have been working with the trade unions.

"This means that we have to retrain people to move to different positions in the organisation.

"CSR is not negotiable. We have to do this and we can do this. What we need for it to be successful is support for our proposals from the Department of Health and the Minister."

Instead of looking at the negatives this situation poses, Mrs Way says many of the measures they are proposing would have been introduced anyway but at a later date and gives the Trust the incentive to perform more efficiently now.

She said, "We will be speeding up reform and modernisation initiatives that we would have implemented anyway.

"Obviously in an ideal world we would not be facing CSR in our second year as an organisation, but that is the situation that we are in. I accept that the way we do things can be better and I see this as the perfect opportunity to do better."

This savings announcement comes only a couple of weeks after the Trust revealed they had managed to overturn a £14.9 million shortfall last year to balance the books. This was done by "tightening our belts" said Mrs Way, however she continued to explain there are still "underlying financial pressures" from this that need to be addressed in the coming years.

The Trust's chief executive said, "We are required by law to balance the books and we have left no stone unturned in trying to identify deficiencies.

"We are scrambling together very small amounts of money to try and meet these targets. We will continue to tighten our belts, but there simply isn't £37 million worth of deficiencies in the organisation.

"We have rising needs and increasing expectations. It is a very challenging environment in which we work at present.

"We have the largest geography in Northern Ireland as a Trust and one of our policies is to deliver as much as we can locally as we don't want clients having to travel to a central point for every service."

In order not to discriminate against affected groups in regard age or sex for example, the Western Trust intend to have detailed public consultations regarding some of it's proposals to outline its intentions to those that avail of these services to get their reaction before making any final decision.

Despite this, the Trust are still expecting strong public and political complaints to the changes they will make over the course of the next three years.

"Inevitably in terms of the public who use the services, that may notice changes, we anticipate that over the next three years there will be quite a lot of reaction to what we are proposing to do," said Mrs Way.

Although there will be obvious widespread changes to the way services are provided, Mrs Way stressed that the primary focus of the Western Trust will always to provide "high quality, safe accessible services".