The two hospital Trusts in Bristol were merged on 1st of July 2026. On the same day, management announced that they want to cut 44 ‘duplicated services’ and that the A&E department on the BRI site might be closed and concentrated at Southmead hospital in the medium-term future. Otherwise management is not coming clean about planned job cuts – and it seems that the trade unions are happy to let them get away with it. If you think this is exaggerated, please consider the following current example.

Restructuring and redundancies of the Patient First Improvement Team

In June 2026, individual workers of the Patient First team at Southmead contacted their union reps, as management would call them into one-to-one ‘consultation’ meetings about possible redeployment or even redundancies. As far as we know, management wants to reduce the Southmead team from 12 to 4 full-time positions, but even that is unclear. Some of us reached out to Patient First colleagues at the BRI site and also there restructuring is on the agenda. 

But what are the trade unions doing? 

On the BRI site, some leading trade union reps were informed that restructuring is being planned, but they are happy with management’s strategy to call people into one-to-one meetings and to individualise the conflict in that way. As long as workers have the ‘right’ to bring along a union rep, the trade union leaders seem to be happy.

During an initial discussion with members of the Patient First team we noted a similar pattern of management-manufactured consent, dressed up as ‘individual choice’. A senior colleague of the Patient First team insisted that their situation was “entirely distinct” and “a case apart from other teams” that underwent restructuring previously – and that comparing cases could “trigger anxiety”. They demanded that support be channelled only through “individual Union representatives” and Service Leads.

We helped set up a short online meeting, where affected colleagues from both Southmead and the BRI met and exchanged experiences. We made clear suggestions: 

• Write a joint statement from teams from both sites, declaring that we reject the redundancies
• Formulate an alternative plan: how can we save the grown collective experience and knowledge of the team and how can we provide a good service to patient care?
• Distribute a joint leaflet to all colleagues and patients in the hospital, explaining what your team is doing and why it is worth defending. This is important – when they closed down the Detox unit at Southmead, many colleagues didn’t even know it existed!
• Consider taking industrial action against redundancies and force the trade unions to support you in this.

We proposed smaller steps towards this common strategy. Unfortunately, perhaps also because most team members are Band 7 or Band 8 colleagues, people were reluctant to make a clear collective stance. It seems that management gets away with their strategy to be vague about the general future, while making people individual promises – or not! 

The last time we witnessed such a situation of redeployment was when they re-shuffled the sexual health clinic – some colleagues, who used to work together for years, ended up having to compete for the same jobs!

In the coming months there will be dozens of small cases of restructuring – we cannot allow them to happen in isolation and silence! The Patient First workers from both sites met online together and thereby took a first step. They proved that breaking down team boundaries can be done. We have to stop future job cuts collectively. If your team is facing restructuring, get in touch…