Comment from The Northern Echo: The sums don't add up

It doesn't add up.

The County Durham and Darlington Acute Hospitals NHS Trust insists that it - like a majority of North-East trusts - is likely to break even. It says its redundancies have nothing to do with debt.

Instead, it plans to lose 700 jobs over the next three years because it sees the nature of the NHS shifting in the future.

There is, indeed, some truth to this. Government policy is for more localised walk-in centres, with nurses operating from neighbourhood GPs' surgeries.

There is, indeed, some merit to this. As hospitals necessarily become larger and more distant, people with minor ailments will want to be treated as close to home as possible.

But, over the next three years, are we really going to see a corresponding number of medical jobs - 700 - created away from the big hospitals among the confusing plethora of smaller trusts?

Yesterday other trusts in the region, off the record, greeted the County Durham announcement with a mystification approaching incredulity. Other trusts say they are not planning any massive job cuts to make themselves ready for a re-shaped NHS.

Is County Durham unique, then, in preparing for a future no-one else appears to see?

And what will happen when the Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) amalgamate in the near future. One of the reasons for the amalgamations, which are still being contested, is to save on duplication. This must, inevitably, mean another round of job losses is looming - can there really be so many jobs ripe for the axing?

Which leads to the most baffling part of all this. County Durham and Darlington says that there will be no impact on the standard of patient care by these job losses.

Can a health authority genuinely lose 11.6 per cent of its workforce without its patients feeling a thing?

It really doesn't add up.