Hospital trust needs to find extra £6m savings

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust is already falling around 20 per cent short of the £15m it has to save this year.

And it has emerged that £3m of this year’s savings have been achieved non-recurrently – meaning in total that another £6m will be carried over to 2013/14, which financial bosses said was a “cause for concern”.

The savings are part of the £20 billion total that the NHS needs to save across the country by 2015. The failure to save the £15m the trust had targeted has now had an adverse impact on next year’s budget, with the trust having to save £21.2m in its Change in Programme scheme.

Of next year’s planned £15m savings, £2m will come from a review of temporary staffing and a further £2.2m from procurement savings.

It is not yet known how the extra £6m will be saved. A report of the trust’s income and expenditure plan for 2013/14 was compiled by chief financial officer Kevin Stringer.

It said: “The Trust Change In Programme target for 2012/13 is £15.3m. At month 11, £11.3m has been withdrawn from budgets, which represents 75 per cent of the total. However £3.03m of this has been achieved non-recurrently.

“The level of performance remains a cause for concern and is being monitored closely by the Change Programme Board.”

Of the £11m already saved this year, £400,000 has come from extra income from on-site parking at the hospital. Parking charges were controversially increased last year by 50 per cent to £2 an hour, while free parking for disabled users was scrapped for the first time.

Elsewhere £570,000 has been saved in adult community services, £369,000 in IT services and £285,000 from medicine savings.

Sixty-five per cent of savings schemes have delivered their full targets during the financial year so far, but 100 remain outstanding.

The trust is expected to be hit with a £750,000 fine by Wolverhampton City Clinical Commissioning Group next month for not meeting its target of getting ambulances back out on the road after taking patients to New Cross.

Last year it announced it would be funding a £25m new A&E department to replace the current one – which chief executive David Loughton recently labelled as unfit for purpose – in 2015.