RUSSELLS Hall bosses have admitted the plan to rescue hospital finances is failing and stronger medicine is needed.

Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust is aiming to save £14m to balance its books but the plan is not working fast enough.

To speed up the process the Trust, which employs 4,500 people, has announced it is to remove 400 jobs from its books to cut its wage bill, which is currently £192.8m per year.

Dudley Trust chief executive, Paula Clark, said: “Our priority is always to provide high quality patient care as well as protecting our workforce and if we can get the vacancy controls right then we can reduce redundancies.

“Pay is our biggest cost, making up 70 per cent of spend, and we know we cannot make the type of savings we need without looking at a reducing our spend on staffing.”

The Trust is appointing a panel made up of their directors of strategy and performance, operations and finance plus their deputy director of nursing and their head of human resources to review every vacant job.

The panel will only allow recruitment to positions which are deemed essential, the latest figures from the Trust show on November 20 it had 327 vacant posts of which 182 were clinical.

Health chiefs hope to make the cuts through non replacement when people leave their jobs and say compulsory redundancies will be a last resort.

They blame a combination of rising demand and lower real-terms income for the crisis and say Dudley is not alone in facing financial sickness.

A Trust spokesperson said: “It takes a long time to develop and implement large-scale change schemes in any organisation, not just the NHS.

“Our staff, especially our clinical leaders, are fully engaged in the delivery of our financial proposals and we hope to achieve financial stability by the end of 2016.

“In common with all trusts in England, we are under extreme financial pressures against the backdrop of a budget freeze for the past four years and a requirement to make four percent efficiency savings, year on year, which equates to £10m-£12m.

“The money we get paid for treatments and procedures is also reducing. We have also experienced an increased demand on our services and higher pension costs.”