HEALTH chiefs will be told closure of Kidderminster Hospital is a not an option in efforts to claw back a £20 million overspend.

Following a meeting of members of a clinical service and finance review project board examining the overspend, John Rostill, chief executive of Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, reiterated that closing Kidderminster was a non-starter.

The recommendation of the board - which met last Friday - to the hospital trust will be that use of the hospital should be increased, rather than reduced, to ease the workload on Worcestershire Royal Hospital and the Alexandra Hospital at Redditch.

Mr Rostill said: "The main thing, as far as Kidderminster is concerned, is the option of minimising or even closing Kidderminster is off the agenda and the intention is to maximise the use of Kidderminster, with a view to reducing the pressure both at Worcester and the Alex.

"That's the recommendation of the project board that will go to the trust board."

He added: "There are no possibilities of reducing activities. Indeed, we would expect to increase it and move from 12,000 procedures a year here (Kidderminster) to 20,000 a year."

Hospital trust chairman, Michael O'Riordan, added that board members had also agreed, unanimously, to postpone the start date of any formal public consultation on the review.

That decision was taken following what the trust described as a "tremendous public response" to the review.

Mr O'Riordan said: "We had previously envisaged that a period of formal public consultation on any major service changes could begin immediately after the Christmas break.

"It has now become clear that more detailed work is needed to ensure that any proposals which go out to formal consultation are clinically sound, based on the most robust possible data, can be achieved and will enable us to make the cost improvements that we need to make.

"In addition, our ongoing pre-consultation exercise is bringing in a wealth of comments and suggestions from our staff, clinical colleagues and people across the county, many of which deserve further consideration and will, if appropriate, be brought into the public consultation."

The project board is due to meet again in January.

Mr O'Riordan added: "We have also decided, following many comments and further work, that there is nothing to be gained from changing cancer outpatient services and they will continue to be provided on all three sites for the foreseeable future."