The organisation responsible for co-ordinating healthcare in the county has been told to shrink its costs by 50% by the end of the year – leaving hundreds of jobs at risk.
The government has ordered the Kent and Medway Integrated Care Board (ICB) to reduce its operating costs by £35.2 million by December 31.
A report to be discussed by Medway Council’s Health and Adult Social Care (HASC) Committee on August 20 outlines how these savings could be made – without compromising patient service.
So far the organisation has asked if any of its 770 staff members are interested in voluntary redundancy and received more than 100 responses from people who would be willing to leave.
But the ICB has to reduce its operating costs from £73.5 million to £38.3 million within what remains of the year and is also looking at finding efficiencies and cutting services it should not be providing.
The commissioning budget, which the ICB uses to pay for health services for its two million registered patients, of £4.7 billion a year is not to be reduced, only the costs of organising it.
The £73.5m represents only 1.5% of the organisation’s total budget and is used to commission GPs, children’s services including those with complex needs, mental health services, maternity and neonatal services and pharmacy, optometry and dentistry services, among others.
The report which councillors are to consider next week outlines how a plan of what the ICB would be expected and be able to achieve with the reduced budget has been put together and work is now being done to create a plan for how it would be organised.
The ICB has also created a list of services which can be shared across other organisations and functions which can be centrally run for the whole south east.
Plans for how to fund various departments while reducing staffing by 49% – about 380 people – have also been developed.
The reason for the move follows the government’s decision to scrap NHS England by April 2027 and bring its operations within the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) as an efficiency measure.
In the 10-year plan for the NHS which was published last month, the government set out that ICBs are to shift to three main priorities, the first being the prevention of illness through improving general health and therefore reducing costly procedures further down the line.
Secondly, moving care into communities, rather than being conducted primarily from hospitals, which is believed to help in the shaping of care into being more bespoke for an area’s needs.
And finally, using technology to improve decision making and streamline processes.
The Kent and Medway ICB is not among those across the country which are either being merged or having their boundary changed.
Medway Council will question representatives from the ICB about the reduction at the HASC meeting on August 20.
