THE cash strapped and troubled trust running the county’s hospitals is under fire again after it emerged it had paid out an ex top boss a six figure sum, despite him being off work for two years.

There have been reports that Stewart Messer has been absent from his role as Chief Operating Officer at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (WAHT) since May 2015.

But in the two-year period since he has been on full pay on a reported £120,000 a year contract, before an exit package of more than £200,000 was paid out to him, and £500,000 was spent on three interim directors to cover his absence.

It is understood the Trust paid £200,000 to Rab McEwan to temporarily replace him, before he himself was replaced with interim Chief Operating Officer Jim O’Connell, believed to be on a salary of more than £100,000 per year.

The Trust, which runs Worcestershire Royal Hospital as well as the Alexander Hospital in Redditch, has had finanical pressures for a while - with a deficit of more than £25 million, and £4.8 million over budget last year, which was attributed to an increase in admissions to the hospitals.

A spokesperson for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust said: “We have fulfilled our legal obligation to publish information regarding the remuneration of Mr Messer up until he left the employment of the Trust, as well as details of all exit packages agreed during the year.

"For legal reasons we are unable to comment any further.”

Meanwhile new figures have been released that show on an average day at Trust hospitals 26 beds are occupied by patients who no longer need to stay in hospital.

According to figures from NHS England in May, the latest month for which figures are available, patients at the trust spent a total of 803 days waiting to be discharged or transferred.

The figures show that 57 per cent of these delays were caused by problems with the NHS and one per cent by problems with social care.

A ‘delayed transfer of care’ occurs when a patient remains in a bed after being officially declared ready for transfer. Patients must be safe to transfer and signed off by both a doctor and a multidisciplinary team, which could include social or mental heath care workers, before they are classified in this way.

The figures do not include delays in transferring a patient between wards, or from one acute hospital to another.

Across England, an average of nearly 4,500 beds a day were blocked in May, representing roughly 3.8 per cent of all occupied beds. The government target is 3.5 per cent.

Commenting on the national figures, a spokesperson for the NHS said: “Patients who are well enough to leave hospital should be able to do so at the earliest opportunity.

“The latest figures show 1,258 more beds were available in May 2018 than in the same month a year ago due to the action taken to reduce delayed transfers of care.”