A mental health trust heavily criticised by government inspectors has postponed cutting £500,000 from care services after about 1,000 staff threatened to strike.
Managers at the Manchester mental health and social care trust yesterday agreed to negotiate with Unison, Amicus and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) over plans to cut £300,000 from elderly care and £185,000 from adult care services.
The trust board will now decide on December 17 whether to press ahead with the cuts, which include the closure of an elderly care ward and freezing the recruitment of unfilled nursing posts.
But Unison warned that even if the board backed down, it would still ballot members for industrial action in January if managers failed to resolve the ongoing financial crisis at the trust, which has compromised patient and staff safety.
Karen Reissman, a community psychiatric nurse (CPN) and chairwoman of the joint shop stewards committee at the trust, said: "Even if the board withdraw these latest cuts we will hold a strike ballot in January, unless it comes up with a plan to address the previous cuts to adult services, which have left patients and staff at high risk.
"I think it's unlikely the board will be able to sort out its financial problems in that time because it's going to overspend by £1.3m this year, despite borrowing £4.4m."
The board approved the current round of cuts last month in a bid to curtail the trust's spiralling debts, which currently stand at £6m.
But nurses branded the cuts "insensitive" coming only two months after a damning report by the commission for health improvement found that patients were placed at high risk of abuse partly because of low staffing levels.
The trade unions say the care trust has been in financial crisis ever since its inception as the Manchester mental health partnership in 2000. The partnership brought together five organisations and had a sizeable deficit before it officially became a care trust, providing health and social care, in April last year.
Ms Reissman said: "We've less money now than when we were a general health trust. We've had one cut after another to the point where the risk to staff and patients is escalating."
Only patients who pose a serious risk to the public now stood a chance of being admitted to a psychiatric ward, she added.
"I had one patient who was really ill and wanted to go to hospital, but I knew he would never get to the top of the waiting list because he did not pose a high risk to others. I have a colleague who put a patient's name down four months ago and they still haven't been admitted," said Ms Reissman.
"The almost exclusive focus on the severely mentally ill meant that staff were unable to ensure that people who were well and living in the community did not relapse, she added.
Rebecca Hughes, a clinical psychologist and Amicus MSF branch secretary at the trust, said: "It's a very unstable and insecure environment for people to work in.
Ms Hughes said that primary care mental health services, which were supposed to deal with mild mental health problems, had to treat people with severe mental illnesses because they could not get a hospital bed.
"It's a demoralising state of affairs. We're having to treat personality and anxiety disorders and managing people with a high risk of suicide, which we're not set up to deal with."
Paul Corry, head of policy at the mental health charity Rethink, said: "There is a developing crisis in mental health. Welcome new money from government to support its ambitious plans for service reform seems to be vanishing into a black hole.
"Around the country we are hearing reports of services being cut back and concentrated almost entirely on people in need of acute care. People who need support to prevent them descending into a crisis are simply overlooked. They are developing into a forgotten generation."
No one at the trust was available for comment.
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