St John Ambulance has cut staff numbers by 162 and paid out £700,000 of redundancies, according to its annual accounts.
According to the accounts, for the year to December 2016, the charity saw total staff numbers fall from 2,230 to 2,068. Full time equivalent staff numbers fell by 103 to 1,767.
The charity had been growing its staff numbers steadily over the last few years. The most recent drop takes it back to the level of staffing it had in 2014.
The charity’s total income fell by £4.5m to £102.2m, largely as a result of reduced provision of reduced demand for ambulance services, which the charity said was driven by “funding restrictions within the NHS”. Income from ambulance services fell from £24.9m to £20.3m.
Other than ambulance services, the charity’s main sources of income were the provision of training, worth £40.3m, and donations and legacies, worth £14.7m. Both of these were broadly in line with the previous year.
'Large organisational change'
The charity also launched a new strategy and operating model during the year, which it described as a “large organisational change”. The strategy includes a focus on ensuring life-saving training is introduced among young people. The charity has also launched a new campaign to ensure parents know how to provide first aid to children.
Among other things the reorganisation saw it consolidate regional administrations from eight to four, and restructure its senior leadership team, with five people leaving and another four being appointed to different roles.
As part of this process, termination payments took one senior staff member’s total pay to £180,000.
“This was a year in which the charitable sector as a whole was under the microscope and a challenging NHS environment created additional pressures for us,” the charity’s chief executive, Sue Killen, and chair, surgeon rear admiral Lionel Jarvis, said in a joint statement. “We took the opportunity to review our governance, structure and operational activity to ensure that we are both more effective and more resilient for the future, and that we continue to meet the standards set by all our regulators.”
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