Trust declares ‘business continuity’ in bid to cut staff costs

The step, revealed by Sussex Partnership Foundation Trust at a recent board meeting, means it can redeploy clinically trained staff who don’t normally work in frontline roles into clinical work, HSJ understands.

The “incident” is expected to last for an extended period and an end date has not been set. Clinically trained staff will be redeployed to other roles throughout the period. It hopes this means it will need fewer agency staff and be able to open more inpatient beds.

A spokesperson for the trust said: “Entering business continuity helps us improve the quality of care we provide to patients and make the most effective use of our resources, reducing out of area hospital placements, reducing use of temporary agency staff and strengthening urgent and crisis care services.

“We are temporarily redeploying some staff with clinical qualifications who are working in non-clinical settings, and a comprehensive programme of work is already under way to address the issues that will help us deliver the fastest and most effective improvements.”

The trust’s last board meeting, on 5 October, heard it had seen inappropriate out of area placements of inpatients nearly double since the start of the financial year, with 30 in July and 27 in August – representing 871 bed days in August alone. The board heard four patients had been placed in Glasgow – over 400 miles away.

The meeting was also told that agency staffing spend had steadily increased since March 2021 and in August represented 13.5 per cent of the pay bill, against a target of 5.2 per cent.

Medical agency spend in this financial year has averaged £635,000 a month and nursing agency spend was £1.5m a month. In some months, more than half of the nursing spend was with agencies who are not on the national agency framework and whose rates are normally higher.

This contributed to a deficit of £5m by the end of August, against a planned surplus of £0.4m.