Hospital training costs

East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the hospital together with Eastbourne District General Hospital (DGH), is to introduce 'strategic business units' giving department heads control over their own spending by November 2010 and has begun to outline how this may work.

There will be four units - surgery and anaesthetics, medicine and elderly care, women and children and clinical diagnostic support. Each will be headed by a divisional director, a nurse and a manager, each of whom will need training.

Staff will be assessed on their skills and could be required to sit a business school development programme, typically costing 11,500 a head.

A training course provided by the King's Fund would cost 2,000 per person and a development centre, where staff's performance is looked at, more than 3,000 per person.

The Trust plans to offer off-site business learning, master classes in corporate skills, individual and team coaching.

Monica Green, the trust's director of human resources, said the training would be done in time already set aside for career development so would not cost the hospitals extra for replacement staff.

She said: "This is about devolving management down to clinicians hopefully getting better information to help deliver better services."