Hospital staff in Bradford have been asked to consider opting for voluntary resignation in a bid to reduce costs.

Bosses at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which manages Bradford Royal Infirmary and St Luke’s Hospital, have started a programme called Mutually-Agreed Resignation Scheme (MARS) in the face of economic problems.

The Trust is in the second year of a three-year plan to make savings of £50 million and staffing is its biggest expenditure. It is looking to reduce overall costs by five per cent each year, in line with other NHS organisations.

The scheme is designed to help employers manage reductions and the workforce implications of redesigning services. It enables individual employees, in agreement with their employer, to choose to leave their employment voluntarily, in return for a severance payment.

The Trust has stressed it is not a redundancy programme. A spokesman also said there was not a target number of applications for the MARS scheme and no specific savings target either.

When asked if frontline jobs were at risk, a Trust spokesman said: “As posts become vacant we always review whether or not they need to be replaced.

“In many cases there are different ways of doing the work previously done by these staff. This applies to both clinical and non-clinical roles.

"As part of our ongoing work to improve productivity we are offering our employees a range of flexible working arrangements which can work in the interests of both members of staff and the organisation.

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