A SENIOR manager at Staffordshire's biggest hospital received a golden handshake of more than £100,000 after being made jobless.

The package was among £408,0000 of severance payments to 15 staff made redundant by the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in the year to the end of March.

And now the sum is set to grow as the Hartshill complex is poised to make more job losses in the coming year.

Its bosses have refused to rule out further compulsory redundancies to help balance its books and nurse leaders say they are bracing themselves for the blow to be announced in the late summer.

But the trust would not reveal how much cash had been set aside to cover redundancy costs in the current year.

Figures issued by the trust's finance department yesterday showed the unidentified manager negotiated a severance deal of between £100,000 and £150,000.

They also revealed two staff pocketed between £40,000 and £100,000, four were paid £20,000 to £40,000 and the remaining eight received less than £20,000. In the previous year, just two compulsory redundancies were made, costing the trust £37,000.

The hospital, which has 6,500 people on the payroll, is having to cut £24 million from its £415 million budget this financial year and has so far identified around £16 million of the savings required by March 31, 2012.

Human resources director Margot Johnson said: "While we will do all we can to avoid making redundancies, we cannot rule that out. Any severance costs will come from the sums we keep as reserves.

"The payment we made exceeding £100,000 was to a senior manager with many years of service."

Royal College of Nursing officers at the trust say they understand that the workforce must fall in line with a reduction of 300 beds ready for when a smaller replacement hospital opens on the City General site and many services switch to the community.

But RCN senior steward Chris Bourne said: "Despite us always being led to believe all these posts would be moving from hospital into the community, there are just not the jobs being created out there to mop them up."

And NHS campaigners said the hospital was being hit by a "double whammy" – losing experienced, skilled staff and having to find the cash from already tight budgets to make them redundant.

Ian Syme, co-ordinator of North Staffordshire Healthwatch, said: "If there are major job losses at a hospital as a direct result of Government policy, the severance payments should come from central Government.

"As it stands, a community loses highly-skilled staff and then services have to be cut to pay the cost of making them redundant.

"This becomes a vicious downward spiral and shows the Government's promise of no NHS job cuts to be a fallacy."