Health trust has callously dumped patients and staff

Published: 15 April, 2010

• I WAS astonished to read that the Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust is apparently in crisis. 
Sacking most temporary staff and freezing all clinical jobs (Key mental health workers axed in £5m ‘efficiencies’, April 8) is not in my experience the sign of a well run organisation, but one that is chronically mismanaged.
If the hundreds of staff that have been sacked at the mental health trust were unnecessary then they should have been let go sooner in an orderly way instead of in a last-minute, panic measure.
The trust cannot even do what it says it does best: stay within budget. It had three years to implement a painful £13million “cost improvement programme”.
It cut services to vulnerable parents with small children, young women who are starving themselves and single men who want to commit suicide because they feel worthless. 
Now staff have lost their jobs because the executives were not up to theirs.
Patients and staff have been callously dumped despite its annual report showing the trust having several millions in surplus cash and its income going up steadily.
That chief executive officer Wendy Wallace can get an 11.5 per cent pay rise to £130,000 for this mess, shows that the trust is not short of money, just of ideas.
DR MARGARET THOMAS
Psychotherapist, NW1