UP to 300 jobs are to be cut at hospitals in Worcestershire as part of plans to save about £60 million.

The administrative and clerical jobs are to go at Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Kidderminster Hospital and Redditch Alexandra Hospital by 2017 as Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust looks to find annual savings of £15 million for the next four years.

The trust insists the cuts will not affect medical staff.

A spokesman said the staffing cuts will be made possible by “new ways of working” and better use of IT.

“We want to reassure our staff that it is too early to confirm the position regarding job losses, although it is inevitable that we will lose some non clinical posts over time as we streamline our processes and make better use of IT systems,” she said. “Where posts do need to go we will look to achieve this through natural wastage and voluntary redundancies, with compulsory redundancies being the last resort.”

The spokesman added that the trust planned to maintain a similar number of clinical staff, and be less reliant on expensive agency staff - which can often cost as much as three times more than NHS equivalents.

The trust said the job losses were not related to the planned £35m reorganisation of health services in Worcestershire, which includes the possible downgrading of emergency operations at the Alexandra Hospital.