Ensuring we deliver sustainable NHS services in the future

You will have seen lots of media coverage over recent months about the financial challenges the NHS is facing, as it looks to change the way it oversees and delivers services in the future and stay within the budgets it has available. 

This includes national announcements about how the national body that oversees the delivery of NHS services, NHS England, will be merging with the Department of Health and Social Care to reduce management oversight costs and ensure that money is prioritised for care delivery. 

The Trust, like all NHS organisations, is also facing the challenges of living within the budgets we have and is having to look locally at whether we are making the very best of every £1 we spend.

Like everyone at home, we are struggling with the increasing costs of things like energy, food and increased national insurance contributions, and it has been increasingly difficult to pay for everything within the £190m budget we have each year.

We have done significant work already to look at how efficiently and effectively we are using our budgets and have already identified significant savings we could make to be as productive as possible and prioritise spend on direct patient care. What we do know, however, is there is more we need to do to ensure we don’t end with a deficit in March 2026.

More work has already started to look at every inch of how we deliver our services, including at how productive we are being, our spend on supporting services versus direct care delivery and are we getting the best value for money for the things we buy and contract out.

We know this is going to involve some very difficult decisions and that we are going to have to work differently in the future, and we’ll be talking lots more in the coming months on what type of ways we may have to change.

Please be assured, however, that our underlying principle will continue to be that our patients and carers are at the heart of decision making and we will be trying as far as possible to look at costs that are furthest away from patient care first.

We will also have robust processes in place to ensure we look carefully at the impact through various lenses, including patient safety, quality and patient experience and any unintended consequences on any particular group of our community.

This will be a very challenging time and we ask that you bear with us while we undertake this work in more detail to be able to explain more on what this might mean. We will update again as soon as we are able.