“SICKENING, outrageous and ironic.”
Those are the words of devastated healthcare workers who face redundancy despite providing vital acute care to patients in their homes to ease the county’s hospital bed crisis.
In a letter to staff, council bosses blame axing community rehabilitation assistants from Bournemouth Intermediate Care Service due to £426,000 funding cuts from NHS Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).
Remarkably, it comes just one day after the Daily Echo revealed Bournemouth council’s chief executive is set to receive a staggering £390,000 pay-off for leaving his job – and a month after the end of a public consultation into a controversial shake-up of health services in the county focused on a model to ‘bring care closer to home.’
Run by Dorset HealthCare, the team which provide specialist care to thousands of seriously ill patients at home every year, would be cut from 21 to just eight if proposals go ahead.
Bemused workers said the move would put even more pressure on hospitals, the ambulance service and GPs who refer patients to the team, therefore costing more for the cash-strapped NHS.
Team leader Joy Ainley told the Daily Echo: “The timing of it all does stick in everyone’s throat.
“Frankly, it is sickening, outrageous, ironic, we just can’t understand it because care closer to home is the Government’s focus. It has come completely out of the blue and has left us totally devastated. It is like a bombshell has hit us.
Read More at: Daily Echo ( 24th March 2017)