NHS Borders call crisis meeting with Scottish Government to plug £30 million deficit

Health bosses at NHS Borders have said frontline services will be impacted as they try to find ways to save more money than ever before.

The board has a deficit of almost £30million and has called an emergency meeting with the Scottish Government to discuss its options.

The public have been told to expect to see frontline services, hospital beds, and the workforce impacted in the year ahead.

In a public meeting of the board, Chief Executive Ralph Roberts admitted thatthe level of savings they need to make is unprecedented, and still doesn’t go far enough.

“The level of savings that we've identified is twice the amount we've ever delivered in a year before, and that maybe sets out the scale of the challenge,” he said.

“But we're obviously also acknowledging that doesn't take us far enough.

“We're starting the year with a 28 million pound deficit if we don't add in the additional costs we expect to incur next year,” he said.

“If we did nothing else, we would overspend by 40 million pounds.”

With savings tallied up, the health board still projects it will end the year with an overspend of 25 million pounds, which is “certainly not where we would want to be,” he said.

NHS Borders Director of Finance Andrew Bone has said the key issue at the moment is thatthey're “unable to provide a financial plan which balances for the year ahead.”

Unable to balance the books, means that savings will need to be made in “every part of theorganisation.”

“The savings are coming out across the whole of our service, it will need to come out of our workforce, and that will be about looking at the type of workforce we have, reducing things like agency spend and overtime,” continued Ralph Roberts.

“We need to be honest in the NHS, 75% of our cost is staff.

“There is no way we'll make the level of savings required if we continue to increase thenumber of staff that we've got and we will have to look at how we can reduce.”

He assured there would be no compulsory redundancies.

He also said they need to look at the number of beds in the system and will work with other agencies to see how people can be cared for at home or in the community as opposed to in a hospital setting.

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