By Pamela McGowan

Last updated 12:32, Friday, 28 November 2008

Hospital bosses expect to save £1 million this year after allowing around 70 staff to quit in return for cash pay-outs.

The North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs Carlisle’s Cumberland Infirmary and the West Cumberland Hospital, Whitehaven, launched the voluntary severance scheme in July.

It offered a financial package to those staff – out of a total workforce of 4,000 – willing to leave their posts voluntarily.

They blamed financial pressures on the need to make huge savings – totalling £14.2 million this year alone.

They have always stressed that compulsory redundancies would only ever be a last resort.

All staff who have worked at the North Cumbria Acute Hospitals NHS Trust for more than 12 months were eligible to apply for voluntary severance. Around 130 applications were received from across the trust, but bosses said there was no automatic entitlement to the pay-out, as some individuals could not be lost.

Each case was assessed against a series of criteria and they have now confirmed that around 70 were successful.

Most of these are clerical posts rather than medical and are expected to make the trust around £1 million in savings.

Carole Heatly, the hospitals’ new chief executive, said: “Around 70 members of our staff have taken advantage of the trust’s voluntary severance scheme.

“Quite a number of staff took this as an opportunity for early retirement, others have decided to move abroad or take up the chance of alternative employment outside the NHS.

“The majority of staff taking up this scheme worked within administration.”

She added: “We anticipate this will be a saving to the trust of around £1 million which will help us to deliver our cost improvement programme this year.”

After starting the year with the need to make £14.2m in savings, by July bosses had managed to find more than half. But they still had to find ways of slashing a further £7 million from their predicted annual spending, which prompted them to look at staffing costs.

At the last board meeting, in November, managers reported that they had now achieved almost £10 million of their overall savings target, leaving them with around £4.5 million to find by the end of the financial year, in March 2009.