NHS bodies in South Cumbria and Lancashire had a deficit of nearly £150million at the end of the financial year.
The Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board had a deficit of £148.6 million at the end of March 2024 after receiving £80 million in funding from NHS England, according to a report prepared for the committee.
The finance performance report says as of March 31, the providers had a deficit of £59.6 million and the ICB had a deficit of £89.0 million. Without the NHS funding the deficit would stand at £228.6 million.
In the meeting chief finance officer Sam Proffitt said: “We’re working very hard now on a position and a plan going into next year that is lower than where we’ve ended this year, with a real plan to move back into recurrent financial balance.”
As at the end of March 2024, total savings of £240.7m have been delivered by the system, which is a ‘shortfall of £46.0m’ against plan. Of this, £165.9m (69 per cent) has been delivered recurrently, the report says.
The board was told this is the highest amounts of recurrent savings ever delivered by the system.
Ms Proffitt said: “It is a significant deficit for the system and it’s one that’s having a huge amount of focus by all of us in the board, in our senior teams and across the organisations.”
Ms Proffitt told the board ‘as we went through COVID we put in an awful lot of additional temporary capacity’ in terms of additional staff and beds.
Ms Proffitt added: “The assumption at the start of the year was that’s temporary, COVID’s now moved on, we should be able to shut some of that down and deescalate some of that.
“That has not been possible.”
Another reason for the deficit has been the ‘really big significant hit’ on continuing healthcare budgets, Ms Proffitt explained.
“We are one of the highest spenders of continuing healthcare in the country and we have a significant hit this year on inflation and on new packages and that has contributed to a bigger pressure in the ICB books,” she said.
“What I would say is we are putting lots of work in around this and when we moved into the Autumn that level of risk we saw in not being able to take the capacity out and seeing those sorts of pressures on our CHC (continuing healthcare) led to a reforecast.
“Every organisation in the system has worked extremely hard to land where we said we would be at the end of the year.”
