HOSPITAL jobs and beds will go as NHS bosses try to claw back £50 million over the next three years.

A list of options about how Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which manages Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester, will save the cash will be published this month as part of a ‘joint services review’.

The £50 million is only the hospital trust’s share of savings of between £150 million and £200 million which must be saved across the NHS in Worcestershire by 2015/16.

Chris Tidman, the trust’s deputy chief executive, said: “The review is clinically led and it’s not going to be driven by money - it’s going to be driven by the best care we can give within the resources we have got. It’s not driven by directors or managers in suits but by doctors and nurses.”

Mr Tidman said 100 clinicians - doctors, nurses, consultants - had been involved in shaping the proposals which will come up for public consultation between August and October.

The review of services is needed because demand for services is rising, the result of a growing elderly population, rising cost of drugs and treatments and an NHS budget which is effectively frozen (not increasing in line with inflation).

The options will involve potential changes to planned care, elderly care, women’s and children’s services and emergency care which includes A&E and emergency surgery.

Mr Tidman said: “A lot of our hospital beds are occupied by people who actually could be discharged to less complex settings. We know if we could move a lot of our elderly patients back home with social or health care support packages or if we could get people moving much more quickly into nursing home care then we could actually close beds and that space could be used for something else. There will have to be a reduction in the number of posts but we’re not planning any mass redundancy package.”

The trust’s aim is to reduce staff by not replacing people who decide to leave the trust.

Mr Tidman said the trust was exploring ways of bringing more specialist care to Worcestershire hospitals, including the possibility of bringing back specialist renal work to Worcester like some of the kidney dialysis now performed in Birmingham.

Patients are already receiving life-saving primary angioplasty treatment 24 hours a day, seven days a week at the Royal rather than having to travel to Birmingham and cancer services including satellite radiotherapy is also being developed.

Mr Tidman also stressed that trust finances were well-managed with the trust breaking even in the last financial year (2012/13) and the year before. A £21 million working capital loan to help the trust pay off its bills in 2012/13 was to deal with historic cash problems he said.