Cash-strapped Angus health bosses must find £750,000 in savings due to soaring prescription costs and demands on community hospitals, it has emerged.
Angus Community Health Partnership (CHP) has confirmed it will not meet NHS Tayside’s financial targets this year despite deep cost cutting.
Committee members at the partnership, which has devolved responsibility for care and medicine in the county, heard £130,000 in cuts to part-time hours and bank staff budgets will be swallowed by an overspend of £400,000 in medicine alone.
Finance manager Alexander Berry says the reduction in staffing costs has been achieved by an increase in the number of “further short-term vacancies” and a reduction in equipment costs.
His report states: “The last report to the committee (December) suggested a year end overspend of £468,000. With the January projected year end out-turn being an overspend of £330,000, there has been an improvement.”
Agency staffing costs of £31,000 were removed entirely over the last year, while bank nurse costs were cut from £409,000 in 2012-13 to £377,000 in the year to January 2014.
NHS Tayside’s budget setting process for 2013-14 devolved a “recurring” savings target of £1.503 million to Angus CHP’s Hospital and Community Health Services, out of a total £1.893 million across the partnership.
However, according to Mr Berry’s report, such savings will become ever harder to achieve after one-off costs have been cut.
A spokesman for NHS Tayside said: “The Psychiatry of Old Age (POA) service had a reduced average level of staff absence in 2013-14 compared to 2012-13 leading to reduced staffing costs to backfill these positions.
“For services such as POA, a major determinant of ongoing costs is the level of complexity of care required by patients.
“This does vary over time and the financial position of the service since October has been affected by the increased need for special observation of patients.”
The prescribing overspend of £400,000 continues to be largely attributable to unit prices being in excess of planned levels which in turn is partly due to raw materials shortages having an effect on prices.
The average cost for each prescription item for NHS Tayside in April to October 2012 was £10.29, and for April to October last year it was £10.32.
A meeting of all NHS Tayside partnerships and senior management this month will discuss implications for the financial year. Some £21.3 million in savings was identified for 2013-14 and £15.1 million has already been saved across NHS Tayside as of January this year.