Nottinghamshire Healthcare offers staff chance to take up MARS offer

However, the trust says this is not a voluntary redundancy scheme and it has no plans for redundancies at this time.

Fears had been raised – and rumours had circulated on social media – that the MARS was the beginning of a redundancies scheme, leading to concerns over the budgets and finances of the trust at a time when several NHS trusts are heavily stretched in staffing numbers.

But Jen Guiver, Nottinghamshire Healthcare’s executive director of people and culture Jen Guiver said this was not the case.

She said: “On Monday, January 15, the trust announced to colleagues that it is launching a Mutually Agreed Resignation Scheme (often referred to as MARS in the NHS).

"MARS allows an individual employee, in agreement with their employer, to choose to leave their employment in return for a severance payment.

"It is really important to be clear that MARS is not a redundancy or a voluntary redundancy scheme and the terms under which applicants resign are very different.

“We can confirm that we have no plans for redundancies at this time, in fact we continue to recruit to positions across the trust.

"We are simply using MARS to provide some flexibility as we begin to address the need for large-scale transformational change in the way we deliver care to our patients.

"This transformation is needed so that we can provide the very best care to our patients into the future.”