WE HAVE been reading about the £12.5 million funding gap our clinical commissioning group (CCG) faces over the next 12 months.


Some cost-cutting measures have already been reported and the proposal to delay non-urgent hospital referrals has been back-tracked.

However, it has not been widely reported how the CCG now plans to attempt to make more savings.


The CCG has decided to seek to appoint an organisation or group of organisations to provide Out of Hospital Nursing and Intermediate Care Services.


This includes all our community services, which are district nurses, phlebotomy, specialist nurses, community matrons, treatment rooms as well as intermediate care.

Currently, these services are provided by Bridgewater Community Nursing Services as well as 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.


The CCG has had the opportunity to work with the current providers and agree a mutual plan where realistic changes could be made to make improvements but they have still chosen to use this expensive process.


No one would argue that the CCG is right in wanting to strengthen services and improve outcomes for our local community and ensuring they have value for money but it should be questioned why the CCG has decided not to work with their current providers. 


Many aspects of the proposed services are already being delivered by Bridgewater Community Trust. The current workforce is 131 whole time equivalent staff and the proposed workforce will be cut by 31 resulting in possible redundancies. 


As community services are already overstretched and unable to maintain the growing demand, I can not foresee any improvement in the quality of patient care with less staff. 


EAM (name and address submitted)