MORE than 20 experienced nurses have been sent home on full pay after a hospital unit for the elderly was axed, the Daily Echo can reveal.

Staff from Southampton's Royal South Hants Hospital could spend months at home waiting for the trust to find them new jobs.

Meanwhile, 25 elderly patients on the ward have joined the scramble for high-demand community hospital beds and nursing homes.

Southampton MP John Denham has dubbed the situation "ludicrous" and said years of planning should have gone into the ward closure.

Health bosses say the nurse-led unit was closed to boost care in the community, not to save money.

They claim they have offered work to the nurses, but none of them have taken it up.

Now unions are warning that Southampton is heading towards a bed-blocking crisis.

But while some claim it is a desperate attempt to claw back cash, Southampton University Hospitals Trust bosses say it is a positive move towards care closer to home.

Union leaders are calling on staff to turn up at the hospital and demand that they be allowed to do the job they are being paid for.

Yesterday, the final nurse-led unit at the Royal South Hants Hospital, in St Mary's, Southampton, pictured above, closed for good.

Twenty-five non-acute beds, mainly for elderly patients not seriously ill enough to be on a ward and not well enough to return home, were axed.

The patients were passed on to primary care trusts (PCTs) or social services. The idea is that intermediate care should be provided in the community, not by hospitals.

But nurses say the community facilities are simply not there.

They claim patients already wait up to a year for places in nursing homes, then face sky-high fees as establishments increase prices in line with demand.

For the 20 to 30 nurses on the ward, mostly part-timers with decades of nursing experience, the closure was yet another blow.

Trust bosses had promised to redeploy staff within the trust, but with no other non-acute wards left, this will be virtually impossible for the specially-trained RSH nurses.

Some were offered jobs at Countess Mountbatten Hospital in Romsey.

But most were sent home on full pay, which is known as 'gardening leave', to wait by the telephone until trust bosses find them a new post.

Their redundancy package does not start until April 8 - meaning a total of 1,000 paid-for nursing days will potentially be lost while highly-qualified staff sit at home.

Many have been forced to change jobs up to four times as one by one, SUHT closed its nurse-led units, starting with Chilworth's Fred Woolley House in 1995.

Now they speak of disillusionment with an employer they no longer trust.

The scandal emerged at a meeting organised by public services union UNISON yesterday, when nurses from all over Southampton gathered to talk to MPs about the city hospitals' cash-saving plans.

UNISON branch chairman Bobby Noyes told the meeting: "The trust are putting staff on gardening leave because they have mucked up the redundancy process.

"They are paying people to sit at home and that's absolutely atrocious when there are patients that need care."

She added: "What we have here is absolute chaos.

"We have a group of staff with years and years of experience just being pushed into jobs that they aren't trained for and have no wish to do.

"You're going to finish up losing highly-skilled staff and you're going to have SUHT screaming at the end of next year about bed blocking."

With the announcement on Thursday that Lyndhurst's Fenwick Hospital was to axe all 20 of its beds and redistribute services elsewhere, there are fears that local PCTs are simply not in a position to take more patients.

This could lead to more elderly people being forced to stay in emergency beds, with nowhere to go.

Southampton Itchen MP John Denham described the situation as "two trains roaring towards each other on the same line".

He added: "If, four years ago, there had been a proper plan to build up community services and transfer people out of hospitals, there would not now be this crunch of shutting facilities in the hospital before there are community services.

"It's two trains roaring towards each other on the same line. At some point there's going to be a crash.

"We need to be asking a lot of hard questions about the trust and about the health system as well."

He added that the prospect of nurses being sent home on full pay "defied belief".

"I don't understand what stops one employer talking to other employers who do need these skills, because the patients are still there," said Labour MP Mr Denham.

"It defies belief that something as simple as that can't be put in place."