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Top e-government news, updated daily, and regular features from the top people in the public sector.
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| Call for inquiry into hospital's £100m PFI debt |
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Campaigners are calling for a public inquiry into Queen Elizabeth Hospital's multimillion-pound debts caused by repayments to its private finance funders.
The Woolwich hospital is working on a recovery plan and it has not ruled out making redundancies.
Members of the Greenwich group of Keep the NHS Public are alarmed by the Audit Commission report published last December which said the hospital's cumulative debts could reach £100million by March 2009.
They want an inquiry to examine whether building the hospital in Stadium Road, Woolwich using private funding was appropriate and the best use of the resources available.
They point out the borough lost a total of more than 800 beds when Greenwich District Hospital and the Brook Hospital closed and the Queen Elizabeth opened in 2001. The group has written to the borough's MPs asking them to support the campaign to halt the privatisation and use of private finance initiative (PFI) in the health service.
Chairwoman Frances Hook said the group supported the hospital, Greenwich Primary Care Trust and all the staff who provided our health-care in "impossible circumstances that have been imposed by Government policies".
The commission deemed the debt was due to the hospital having to pay fixed rates to its PFI partner and was not due to bad management.
Hospital trust chief executive John Pelly said: "We are planning to reduce our costs by some £10million over the next 12 months. The majority of these savings will be made through reducing non-pay expenditure and the use of temporary staff and by freezing or removing staff vacancies."
He confirmed a small number of redundancies might have to be made. |
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