TWO departments in York Hospital are to merge as part of cutbacks.

The Wigginton Road hospital is re-organising its wards to reduce the number of beds by 95 because of a reduction in income from North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust (PCT).

The Press has now learned that the ear, nose and throat department is to merge with the ophthalmic area - a department specialising in eye disease which is housed in a building created about five years ago.

Hospital nursing director Mike Proctor said that when the ophthalmic unit was created, patients were generally treated as inpatients and stayed overnight.

But now, they were cared for as day cases so there was no need for the eight to ten beds put aside for their use, which could therefore accommodate other patients.

Mr Proctor said: "It makes sense to use the bed capacity for another speciality. It won't impact on the provision of our ophthalmic service at all."

Hospital bosses revealed last month which wards it was planning to close to reduce its overall bed capacity, including ward 27 - the ear nose and throat ward.

Other wards which face the chop are ward 29, an orthopaedic ward with 23 beds; ward 15, a 20-bed urology ward, and the maxillofacial ward, which has 19 beds.

Ward 38, a neurology ward, is also closing - a move which has attracted strong criticism from people who feel patients treated there have specific needs and should not be cared for elsewhere.

Several beds are also going from ward G3, an obstetrics ward, and ante-natal and post-natal patients now to be treated on mixed wards. A further 20 medical beds will also be lost.

But the hospital has said closed wards would be "mothballed" so they could be re-opened if there were extra patients and more available cash in the future.

About 100 staff are expected to be directly affected by the closures. Managers have said they are doing their best to avoid redundancies through natural wastage, avoiding filling vacancies, and freezing almost all recruitment from outside so existing staff would be the first in line for re-deployment as jobs became free.

News of the changes comes after The Press revealed on Saturday how seven emergency patients a day could be turned away from the hospital's accident and emergency department, because of cutbacks.

* More than 22,300 NHS posts have been lost in the last 18 months, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) claimed today.

It said 200 jobs had gone at York Hospitals NHS Trust, part of 1,735 posts going across Yorkshire and The Humber.