‘Money should have helped save services’

£450,000 spent on consultants despite NHS cuts

Health chiefs who paid nearly half a million pounds on consultants to help draw up plans for farreaching reforms have been criticised by campaigners.

Four health trusts including the body in charge of Kent and Canterbury Hospital commissioned three firms to help and advise them with their Sustainability Transformation Plan (STP).

But campaigners say the £458,500 should have been spent elsewhere as the trust is under enormous financial pressure and is reorganising its services across all its sites.

Ken Rogers, chairman of campaign group Concern for Health in East Kent (Chek), said: “It has left me speechless.

“They are moving services away but spending £450,000 on consultants and I think it is horrendous.

“I am fighting to try and save services at the K&C and we don’t have the money to do it, but there they are spending money on external consultants.”

The figures were released to the KM Group under the Freedom of Information Act.

STPS are long-term plans that set out how health services should be organised to improve care for residents.

In particular, the plans are designed to set out how best to integrate health services with social care provided by councils and address the issue of how to deal with declining budgets.

Last month, Health Education England recommended that half of the 76 trainee doctor posts at the K&C continue their training at the hospitals in Ashford and Margate.

It means the troubled hospital will see its urgent care service scaled back drastically and hundreds of emergency patients will be diverted elsewhere.

Acute stroke services are also being suspended, with patients instead being taken to either the hospital at Ashford or Margate for their initial assessment.

The trusts said it was necessary to take on external advisers as they “provided capacity, skills, experience and expertise that wasn’t available to be freed up within existing STP member organisations.”

But Mr Rogers said: “We are yet to see the results, but it is disappointing that they have to go externally as I know there are a lot of experts in these organisations already.

“If we could have spent that money on healthcare consultants, that would have been a better use of the money.

“Spending that sort of money is ridiculous and I always think you should have experts in organisations without paying extra for it.”

A statement from the trusts said: “We are extremely costconscious and have invested only where it has been absolutely necessary to provide capacity, skills, experience and expertise that has not been available, or able to be freed up, within Kent and Medway health and social care organisations. External consultants have been required in the shortterm to bring expertise, capacity and experience of delivering large-scale change programmes that doesn’t readily exist within existing teams.”