HEALTH chiefs in the south have spent more than £28m on management consultants over the past four years, the Daily Echo can reveal.

One authority has paid out £13m in fees while another has been charged nearly £10m.

The figures have been revealed after a Freedom of Information Act request and come as hospitals in the region plan to slash hundreds of staff and millions of pounds from budgets.

Health bosses said management consultants can be cheaper than employing in-house experts. They have been used on projects for cutting waiting times, identifying savings and management training.

But a spokesman for the Taxpayers’ Alliance described the £28.8m spend as “obscene.”

She said: “It is a huge sum of money. I think taxpayers and local patients who are on long waiting lists for treatment or have been denied healthcare will be fuming that millions of pounds have been spent on management consultants.

“Across the whole of the public sector we would like the use of management consultants to be halved and eventually scrapped altogether.”

The spokesman said this could save the NHS millions of pounds –cash that could be spend on hospital beds, life-saving drugs and other treatments.

Dr Nigel Watson, chief executive of Wessex Local Medical Committees, a representative body for GPs, voiced his concern.

He said: “Sometimes management consultants charge quite a lot of money and nothing changes, or they state the obvious. Twenty eight million pounds could be used to employ hundreds of doctors and nurses – or offer a wider range of services.”

Winchester Lib Dem campaigner Martin Tod obtained the figures from five of the Hampshire health trusts.

He said: “We’ve ended up in a crazy world where we’re paying huge sums to top NHS managers and then pay even more huge sums to management consultants to tell them what to do.

“When NHS finances are under such pressure, money should be concentrated on frontline services. We’re short of ambulances and health visitors in Hampshire and we also need to be improving cancer care, mental health and dementia care.”

The South Central Strategic Health Authority, which oversees local primary care trusts providing services like doctors, dentists, opticians and chemists and made the controversial proposals to fluoridate Southamp-ton’s drinking water, paid out £13m in fees since 2006.

The trust paid out £4.7m to management consultants last year up on £3m in 2008 and £2.8m in 2007.

Managers said the spending had helped to improve quality of care across the region. For example, it led to cuts in waiting times for urology services at Southampton City Primary Care Trust from an average 26 weeks to five weeks with fewer visits to the GP and hospital.

Consultants also provided training for staff, including leadership development courses and project management.

A spokesman added spending on management consultants is less than one per cent – 0.06 per cent – of the total £5bn trust budget.

Meanwhile, Hampshire Primary Care Trust, which is in charge of managing and funding everything from local hospitals to GP surgeries, spent £9.9m.

The trust said consultants had been employed to help with setting up a service so GPs can send a digital image of a skin condition to a consultant and receive back a diagnosis and a care plan and developing a new county-wide sexual health review.

Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust spent £3.4m over the last three years on management consultants.

Just two months ago the Daily Echo revealed that up to 1,400 jobs could be axed at Southampton General, Princess Anne and Countess Mountabatten House Hospice as part of a £100m cost-cutting drive.

The first 600 jobs, mostly clerical and managerial, will go over the next two years with a possible 800 scrapped in the following four years.

A spokesman said: “The spend of £3.4m over three years represents only a quarter of one per cent of our total spend of around £450m per annum and includes a number of different forms of consultancy.

“Examples include specialist legal, financial and estates advice that is not provided in-house and specific time-limited projects such as the emergency department process review that helped us organise our patient care services more effectively to ensure we treat 98 per cent of people within four hours of arrival.”

Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the Royal Hampshire County Hospital and Andover War Memorial Hospital, shelled out £1.7m on management.

Meanwhile. the trust is looking for £8.7m efficiency savings this year and has frozen some clerical posts.

Acting chief executive Dr Chris Gordon said: “The trust’s spend on management consultants may sound a lot but equates to less than half a per cent of our turnover during the four year period.

“Bringing in expertise can be a better use of public money when compared to having expensive staff on our salary bill when we no longer need their specialist skills.

“The trust has used management consultancies to support a range of projects. These include the development of our clinical strategy, en effective savings programme and detailed feasibility studies to assist with our estates plan.”

Hampshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which is responsible for running mental health services, spent £736,962 – between 0.05 per cent and 0.1 per cent of its total budget.

A spokesman said outside experts had been employed on about 60 projects over the last two years.