Fears are growing for the future of another city council-run rehabilitation centre after the closure of a South Bristol unit was confirmed. Local authority cabinet members apologised for the “heartache” experienced by the 40 staff at South Bristol Rehab Centre who were left hanging on a decision over their jobs for months, which was finally confirmed last week when councillors formally agreed to shut it.
The original plan was for employees to be transferred over to Sirona at South Bristol Community Hospital where the community health provider runs a similar service – care and accommodation for older people leaving hospital before they go home. But a change in circumstances since the original cabinet decision in January – to save £576,000 a year as part of the council’s budget cuts – means the care workers will no longer TUPE over and will either have to apply to join Sirona in a “preferential recruitment process” or be redeployed within the authority.
Unions urged council leaders to offer voluntary redundancy to staff who no longer wished to stay and warned that the city council’s East Bristol Intermediate Care Centre in Summerhill Terrace, St George, which employs 35 people, could be next in line for the chop. GMB senior organiser Rowena Hayward told a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, May 10, that staff at South Bristol Rehab Centre, in Inns Court, had shown “tenacity, pragmatism and dignity” throughout the process.
