Manchester: Troubled NHS trust sells office

A hospital trust which is £28m in debt is to sell off its headquarters to help balance the books, the BBC reports today.

The Pennine Acute Hospitals Trust said its Westhulme building in Oldham - a former infectious diseases hospital - is going on the market. Staff were told on Friday that they will move to offices across the trust's four hospitals.

It is hoped the move will also help reduce the number of posts to be lost, now estimated as 325. The trust said the majority of staff affected will be redeployed and it hopes that less than 100 will actually be made redundant.

Pennine Acute runs North Manchester General, The Royal Oldham, Rochdale Infirmary and Bury's Fairfield General Hospital. It has an annual budget of more than £400m and employs about 10,000 staff.

But it is facing a £21.3m deficit this year and has an underlying recurrent deficit of £28.3m.

As part of its "recovery programme", about 10% of the trust's 2,500 beds will be reduced, but bosses said that this in line with wider NHS forecasts for moving health services into the community.

The 284 Westhulme staff will move to different hospitals, with the management team and official headquarters based at North Manchester.

So this trust is having to chop 250 beds and cut staff with all the implications for patient care and increased suffering that has - all due to a deficit equivalent to less than TWO days worth of our payments to the EU? Surely the EU can spare a couple of days of our cash to save 250 hospital beds.