Saint Catherine’s consults staff to protect the long-term future

Saint Catherine’s consults staff to protect the long-term future

The world has changed through the COVID-19 pandemic and Saint Catherine’s, like many other organisations, is now dealing with challenges on a range of fronts, often facing incredibly difficult choices. Over the last 4-5 months our income generation has significantly reduced and the impact of this will be a significant deficit in 2020-21 with longer term consequences.

We have taken the short-term action required to ensure our immediate cash flow is under control. Our savings and the small amount of additional government and local authority support has helped us to ensure the protection of our services and our support for our patients, families and carers over the next 12-18 months.

The real challenge begins now. To secure our future beyond the next 12-18 months it is now imperative that we take action to address the long-term financial challenges Saint Catherine’s faces. We cannot be certain when, and to what levels, our regular charitable giving will recover, and whilst keeping patient care and our services at the heart of our decision-making, we have to act to reduce our expenditure to be within the levels of our income.

We are today starting an open collective consultation with our members of staff to explore all options and to consider where we might be able to make changes and operate differently to reduce our expenditure.

We want to protect as many jobs as possible through this process and we will be consulting with our staff about how this may be achieved. No decisions have been made concerning any potential reductions which may be needed and none will be made before we have fully consulted with staff and considered all possible ways in which redundancies could be avoided and any other alternative options.

Our focus therefore is to consult with our staff concerning our proposals, consider their views and support them through this process.

We need to act now to ensure we secure the future of Saint Catherine’s and the services we provide to our patients, carers and their families. We hope that the local community is able to continue to regularly support us to help us protect the long-term future of Saint Catherine’s.

Mike Wilkerson
Chief Executive, Saint Catherine’s