The savings schemes set out by the London clusters entail significant reductions in work carried out by provider trusts, with urgent care centres picking up the slack.

NHS North East London hopes to remodel the emergency and urgent care offer at Newham University Hospital, now part of Barts Health Trust. It also aims to save £4.4m with a “GP streamer [service] delivering a 15 per cent shift of patients to GP surgeries and 100 per cent shift from [the] emergency department to the urgent care centre”, thus “reduc[ing] numbers of avoidable admissions”.

The cluster also hopes just under half of A&E activity at east London’s Whipps Cross, King George and Queen’s Hospitals can be shifted to urgent care centres.

NHS South East London hopes to shave £2.3m off the contract price for the Greenwich urgent care centre, the document reveals.

NHS North Central London plans to save £5.4m by the end of 2014-15 by reducing the number of emergency admissions by patients with a long-term condition, largely through closer management by GPs.

NHS North West London hopes that when enough mental health patients and people with learning disabilities have been moved out of the Rosedale bedded unit in Harrow the primary care trust will be able to save £850,000. The unit is run by Central and North West London Foundation Trust.

NHS South West London seems to be the only cluster looking to make significant savings by “GP list cleansing”.

The table shows the commissioners hoping for a £900,000 saving from a “reduction in list size by nearly 20,000” at the end of 2014-15.

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