Hospice charity cuts 45 jobs as it faces £2.4m deficit

Birmingham Hospice has announced plans to make 14 per cent of its workforce redundant and reduce its number of inpatient beds, as it faces an estimated £2.4m deficit this year.

The end-of-life charity plans to cut the equivalent of 45 full-time roles, which it said equated to about 14 per cent of its workforce. 

In a statement, the hospice said the redundancies come as a result of “unsustainable rising costs”, a “lack of government funding” and an estimated £2.4m deficit in its budget for this year.

In a fundraising appeal launched in May, the charity said it needed to raise about £6.5m to continue providing its services – a £1m increase on last year.

The hospice said that over the past few years it had encountered “big increases in its costs, including the price paid for energy, food and drugs”, adding that the funding it received from the NHS had not risen at the same rate.

The charity said it had already made “significant cost savings” by merging management and support staff roles and made further efficiency savings earlier this year, which resulted in a small number of posts being made redundant.

Birmingham Hospice said it had held a number of meetings with its local integrated care board to negotiate additional funding but the ICB also had a funding shortfall and needed to make savings. 

The hospice has sought to cut non-pay costs and invested in income-generation opportunities such as fundraising and retail operations, but said the return would not match the rate of rising costs.

The charity has also attempted to campaign for additional funding through lobbying at a local and national level, including a petition, meetings with local MPs and councillors and national campaigning through Hospice UK.

Although hospice funding was debated in parliament in April following Hospice UK’s campaigning, the government’s response was that funding decisions were a matter for local ICBs and no additional money would be provided.

The hospice said that without additional support it was “unable to delay these difficult decisions any longer”. 

It added: “As [the hospice] is not underwritten by the government or the NHS, it cannot continue to run a deficit and simply run out of money; if it did, it would no longer exist.”

By making redundancies now, the hospice said it hoped to return to a sustainable budget as soon as possible.

Lucy Watkins, income generation director at Birmingham Hospice, said the charity’s current situation was “entirely down to a lack of government funding for the hospice sector”.

Simon Fuller, chief executive of Birmingham Hospice, said: “The prospect of having to make highly skilled specialist end-of-life clinicians and support staff redundant is totally unpalatable.

“Reducing hospice services is bad for the people of Birmingham, the health care system and those who will be affected by the proposed redundancies.”

He said the charity was doing everything it could to support all of its colleagues during this difficult time.