HOSPITAL redundancy costs rocketed from £46,000 to £637,000 last year – as bosses warned more job losses are on the way.

Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which manages Wycombe, Amersham and Stoke Mandeville Hospitals, made the payouts in 2009/10.

The number of permanent employees fell from 4,010 in 2008/09 to 3,855 last year. But temporary workers rose from 80 to 313.

Bosses warned today that £18m to £20m now has to be slashed from its £307m income to slash costs by 10 per cent. The staff bill is about £180m.

They hope £15m can be removed by cutting down on temporary staff, equivalent to 375 workers.

Chief executive Anne Eden said: “However, in addition to this we need to make reductions in our own directly employed staff.”

She said: “We have put in place robust vacancy and recruitment and temporary staffing controls.

“But the fact is that we will be faced with some redundancies mainly in back office and administrative and clerical functions.”

Some staff would see their jobs change and she pledged to ‘take every practicable step to obviate the need for frontline redundancies as far as possible’.

But the trust was not saving enough cash in the first quarter of this year, from April to June, said Ms Eden.

The trust broke even last year by £146,000. But it is £990,000 in the red so far this year, with temporary staff causing the most problems.

This had led to NHS South Central, which oversees all trusts in the region, to intervene.

“They said it has not got enough traction,” she said of the savings plan. This had led to the appointment of a ‘turnaround director’.

Sending fewer patients to hospital is seen as a key way of driving down costs as care in the community is far cheaper.

Ms Eden was paid £155,000 to £160,000 it was revealed today.

The salary for 2009/10 was included in the trust's annual report for that year. Salaries were only provided in bands.

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