HEALTH WORKERS will be neither amused nor reassured by Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt's off-hand and patronising claim that the NHS is not facing redundancies but a "rebalancing" of the workforce after a period of rapid expansion and increased spending.
The reality is that large numbers of nurses, midwives, health professionals and doctors are among the growing numbers facing compulsory redundancy as Trusts are lorcea to inrow plans into reverse and seek ways of slashing millions in spending to balance their books in a year.
Plans Ior 9,000 J0b Iosses have already been announced by floundering NHS hospitals and Primary Care Trusts as we go to press - with many of the most indebted Trusts yet to announce their proposals to balance their books in a new year of financial crisis.
While Brown's Budget may have studiously avoided any mention of the health service and attempted to divert attention from the escalating chaos that has been
by New Labour's COSLIV and contradictory market-style "reforms", the new financial year has brought a major new factor ratcheting up the pressure on NHS managers - the so-called "payment by results" system.
This has scrapped the previous arrangement of block contracts, and brought in a new regime under which NHS Trusts receive only a fixed fee for each item of treatment they deliver.
The system has been dogged by confusion and crisis, and the entire tariff of fees had to be withdrawn at the last minute and recalculated by embarrassed Department of Health officials, giving Trusts and PCTs little if any time to plan.
Some whole Trusts, and many more departments within NHS Trusts stand to lose out under this funding formula, and a number of Trust bosses have explicitly referred to it as a factor forcSON WE
PAY
UNISON No sign of a militant response yet to the NHS job cuts