Since May, Nursery World has reported on the loss of half a dozen hospital nurseries, closed because of NHS cost-cutting.
Buttercups Nursery, based at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire (UHNS) in Stoke-on-Trent, will shut in January because the UHNS Executive says it can no longer afford to pay the £225,000 annual subsidy.
Parents had been given until 10 November to come up with alternative funding solutions. The board considered their proposals, along with continuing to operate the nursery at a loss until April 2012, but decided that neither would be financially sustainable.
The closure of the 40-year-old nursery affects 65 children and leaves 22 members of staff without jobs.
In a letter to parents and staff, deputy chief executive Chris Calkin said, ‘It is with great sadness and regret that I can confirm the decision is to close Buttercups Nursery.’
‘For many years the Trust has subsidised the nursery, but the introduction of a revised NHS pay scale over the last five years has increased the level of subsidy to an unsustainable amount. This, combined with the increased pressures on funding available in North Staffordshire’s health economy for high quality clinical services, has led the Trust to make a number of difficult decisions.’
Mr Calkin said that attention would now be focused on supporting nursery staff and ensuring redundancies are kept to a minimum.
Marg Randles, operations director for nursery group Busy Bees, which operates 13 nurseries on hospital sites, said the nursery chain was not concerned about its settings as only two are subsidised by the NHS Trust, and if funding was withdrawn parents had already been made aware that fees would be increased to the local market rate.
She said that the hospital sites Busy Bees operate from are not solely dependent on NHS subsidies, so the nurseries would not be affected by changes to NHS Trusts’ financial policy.
Ms Randles added that Busy Bees was careful from the offset to only choose to work with Trusts that were aware of the need not to channel limited NHS resources into settings that provide heavily subsidised childcare.