BOSSES at NHS Tayside are looking to ease the board’s financial worries — after figures showed its overspend increased by almost £3.5 million in one month.
Health chiefs are on course to spend £10.24m more than planned by the end of March.
The use of nursing agency staff is one of the board’s spiralling expenses, up by more than six times compared to the same period last year, at an increased cost of more than £2.5m, according to a new report.
Dr Jean Turner, of the Scottish Patients’ Association, said it suggested that NHS Tayside did not have the permanent staff to cover the workload in its wards.
She added: “Patient care can obviously be affected by budget worries because if you don’t have the staffing levels, people come into work feeling that they can’t do as good a job as they’re trained to do.
“When patient care is involved, departments want to spend as much as they can.
“It always surprises me when such a huge overspend is reported, though.
“How do departments get to this stage? Questions need to be asked.”
A spokeswoman for NHS Tayside said the board was committed to a three to five-year plan of improvements.
She told the Tele that the increased level of overspend in December was as a result of leave pay “arrears” being dished out.
She added: “As a board, we know we are overspending on key areas, including prescribing, workforce and property and that is why these areas are now managed by tailored efficiency and improvement programmes, led by clinicians and managers who are working hard to meet the challenges of the increasing demands on all budgets.
“We are also actively tackling the use of nursing agency staff to reduce the reliance on agency cover across wards.
“We continue to recruit to nursing vacancies and we have very recently opened up the opportunity for all registered nurses, midwives and healthcare support workers to join the NHS Tayside nurse bank to reduce our use of agency staff.”
In addition to cutting down the overspend, the health board needs to make £27m of savings by the end of March, with £3.6m still to find.
The figure of £27m is required for NHS Tayside to break even, Audit Scotland reported back in October.