‘Red-risk’ Trust on target to hit health savings

A REGIONAL health body has given both the Pennine Acute Trust and NHS Oldham a “red-risk rating” over their finances and savings plans.

The Pennine Acute Trust, which runs hospitals in Oldham, Bury, Rochdale and North Manchester, needs to find an extra £13m savings before April, 2012.

This comes on top of the £43m savings it had announced for this financial year (2011-12).

A board paper to NHS North of England said the Trust had recorded an underspend of £1.68m up until November, and had a predicted surplus of £3.5m by April.

The report said organisations with red ratings must submit robust action plans to identify how risks were being managed.

Figures to the board also showed NHS Oldham had underspent by £676,000 up until November and had a forecast underspend of £2.2m by April.

The report said high-risk trusts were being closely monitored but all primary care trusts had forecast a year-end surplus in line with their control total.

Barbara Herring, acting finance director at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said the Trust remained on course to deliver its financial target.

She said: “In February, 2011 we confirmed that the Trust would need to make £43m in cost savings in 2011/12, 8 per cent of turnover.

“This has been a significant challenge and the size of the financial challenge has automatically rated the Trust “red”.

“The Trust’s Transforming for Excellence (TfE) programme however has helped the Trust deliver huge efficiency savings without compromising the quality of clinical care.”

NHS Oldham locality director of finance Steve Sutcliffe said: “We’ve had a huge task to find savings and it was the sheer size of this task which gave us the high-risk rating, rather than whether we were managing to deliver or not.

“In fact we have managed to find these savings and we will balance our books at the end of this year.

“These are still challenging financial times and there will be more savings to find next year, but we are in a strong financial position as we prepare to hand over to Oldham Clinical Commissioning Group.

“The GPs in charge will lead the way in looking for different and innovative ways of doing things in the future, to make sure we get the best value out of every penny we spend.”