Fears over finances at hospital

The financial future of Stafford Hospital has been called into question by its own senior managers after the trust slipped deeper into the red.

The hospital is continuing to see overspends and its forecasted deficit has increased by £600,000 to £2.8 million.

The hospital currently has overspends of around £400,000 a month.

Finance director Mike Gill said there were now issues about the financial viability of the hospital in the long term.

Chief executive Antony Sumara has said the situation is not good enough and that staff are not managing their budgets properly.

The financial crisis has come after £4m was pumped into the trust by the Strategic Health Authority to boost the transformation programme which was created after the damning Healthcare Commission report in March last year.

Finance director and dep-uty chief executive Mike Gill said the forecast deficit at the trust had been increased from £2.2m to £2.8m, with overspends running to around £400,000 a month.

He said that the most recent overspends had been due to the bad weather, the recent outbreak of the norovirus and "low-level overspends" at departments across the trust.

But he added that spending on temporary staff was falling and there had been an underspend in the nur-sing budget in December. He said: "There are issues in the long term about the financial viability of the organisation."

Now bosses at the trust are to get tough with their managers to ensure they hit financial targets.

It has now been decided by the hospital board that dep-artments which are current-ly recording an underspend will have the spare cash taken off them unless they can demonstrate exceptional circumstances.

Chief executive Antony Sumara said immediate action was now needed. He said: "We've actually talked about this three months in a row and it hasn't happened.. People are draining money because they're not managing their budgets and I'm not going to have it. If people aren't using their financial controls then we will take appropriate action to deal with that individual."