HEALTH chiefs paid £300,000 to consultants before telling scores of Hampshire hospital workers their jobs were being cut, the Daily Echo can reveal.

Bosses at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester are poised to axe more than 120 administrative posts as they battle to stem financial losses approaching £11m. More secretarial work will be outsourced to India under the cost-cutting plans.

The proposals follow work by a three-person team from management consultants System 21 to make the local NHS more efficient.

Staff and health unions are furious about the massive contract.

One worker, who asked not to be named, said: “It’s outrageous, hiring people, paying them £300,000 and then sacking people. Morale here is rock bottom.”

Caroline Villiers, regional officer for the union Unison, said: “We’re not convinced System 21 is value for money. Many members of staff were not interviewed by System 21. Their research is not as thorough as we would have liked.”

She said there were concerns about patient safety and added: “People think admin is just writing a few letters, and bureaucrats. But a letter of test results can be crucial to patients. This isn’t a service to cut lightly. This needs to be in-house. I don’t think sending things to India is the answer.”

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However, System 21 managing director Andrew Whiting said its work was value for money as it had identified £1.2m in savings, and denied his team had recommended either compulsory job cuts or transferring work overseas.

He said: “We agreed a plan which would not have required any redundancies. We could make savings through natural wastage, reducing overtime and agency staff.

“It is not nice for us to be linked with redundancies. We believe in making savings without redundancies, which are very expensive.

“There’s no need for redundancies in our 24-month plan. But someone has told them they must make the savings now. I don’t know who that is.”

A spokeswoman for the Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare NHS Trust said: “There is a strict contract arrangement which is directly related to performance and delivery of results. The fee is well within the industry norms.

“System 21 has brought a degree of scrutiny and impartiality which has helped us develop new ideas for providing more efficient and consistent administration services in the future.

“It is important not to give System 21 responsibility for the big picture.”

She confirmed the job cuts were being considered to wipe out the £11m overspend by March 2011, and System 21’s ideas on their own may not have delivered the savings in time.

She denied that the trust had come under direct pressure to ignore System 21 recommendations.

n Staff plan to protest against the threatened redundancies outside the Royal Hampshire County Hospital on Wednesday October 20 at 12.30pm.