AN NHS campaign group has claimed outpatient clinics at Southend Hospital have empty appointment slots due to a lack of administration staff to book them in.

Despite a backlog of patients waiting for appointments with the cash-strapped Mid and South Essex NHS Trust, which manages Southend, Basildon and Broomfield Hospitals, it is said to be running some clinics half empty.

The trust, which currently has a £66.6 million deficit and is running a "mutually agreed resignation scheme", says it is “moving towards a centralised bookings service for outpatients and making improvements in contact centre technology to improve efficiency and book more people in”.

The Save Southend NHS campaign group, said: “Some outpatient clinics are running with empty slots purely because the admin staff that would book them into the clinic have been made redundant and hence there is now inadequate staffing to do this.

“We have evidence that this has occurred for some clinics which have a wait to be seen of over one year and also for a suspected cancer two week wait urgent clinic which ran at nearly 50 per cent capacity purely because of lack of admin staff to book patients in.”

The trust is also said to have installed a new telephone system but has yet to update letterheads with the new numbers, leaving patients finding it difficult to call and confirm appointments.

Claire Dixon, director of outpatient transformation at Mid and South Essex NHS Trust, said: “We are committed to reducing waiting times for treatment and diagnostics and improving patient care, that is why we are transforming and redesigning our outpatient services.

“We are working to reduce vacancies and are actively recruiting to our outpatient referral and communication team. The outpatient team are ensuring that all urgent and suspected cancer clinic slots are filled as a priority as well as supporting the booking of routine appointments whilst we are in the process of recruiting to our vacancies. No staff have been made redundant.”

Matthew Hopkins, chief executive of Mid and South Essex NHS Trust, added: “We are modernising our telephone system to make it easier to contact our hospitals. This is being done via a phased approach. There is call forwarding in place on most old numbers and they are automatically redirected to the new department number. This only relates to the Trust’s in hospital services, not to community or out of hospital providers.”