Manx Care would slow down routine operations as a “legitimate” way to control costs during winter pressures, its CEO has told the Public Accounts Committee.
Ms Cope was answering questions about a period last year when Manx Care knew it would not meet its financial targets and had given a written assurance not to exceed a £15 million overspend.
Giving evidence to PAC, Teresa Cope said that when facing financial pressures late in the financial year, “the only way you can manage at that point is elective activity.”
She said “you can’t turn off any other activity.”
Legitimate
Ms Cope added: “Most organisations, most NHS hospitals, do use elective slowdown as a legitimate way of curtailing costs during winter, particularly when they know that they’ve got increased demand and increased costs in the system during winter,” she said.
However, the outgoing CEO acknowledged that such decisions are “unpalatable, not easy to make, and do result in a lot of anxiety and upset of the public and impact on patients”.
Ms Cope said a key lesson from that period was that decisions of this nature must be signed off jointly by the DHSC and the Council of Ministers.
“We will continue to be in that position of having to make some very difficult choices in order to operate within the financial envelopes we have,” she added.
She told the committee that Manx Care had “worked incredibly hard over the last year to agree how we do some of that”.