Scarborough health body admits its financial position is '˜not great'

The Scarborough and Ryedale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) met today where its financial position was laid bare.

The CCG had previously set a deficit forecast position of £3.6 million but that has now been revised upwards by a further £3.9million.

In a report to today’s board meeting in Scarborough chief finance officer Richard  Mellor set out the reasons why.

He wrote: “The CCG is seeing continuing overspends on acute contracts, continuing healthcare and prescribing, and whilst this continues to be mitigated by underspends on other budgets, the CCG is unable to contain expenditure within [its] plan for the year to date and forecast.

“The consequence of the deterioration in position is that the CCG will not receive sustainability funding for quarter two.”

In quarter one the CCG was given £400,000 by the government in sustainability funding for meeting targets.

The body is forecast to spend more than £3million over its forecast on continuing services alone, this includes care offered to people who need on-going treatment as a result of a disability, illness or accident.

Simon Cox, the CCG’s chief officer, told the meeting that if the forecast loss was as expected it would be similar to the previous year.

He said: “Superficially when you look at the deterioration [of the financial position] against the plan it is disappointing and it is disappointing to not be where we wanted to be.

“This is not meant to sound like making excuses… but at the moment if we hit the figure we are forecasting it will be broadly the same financial position as we finished last year which is not great but suggests if we do that we are avoiding any further deterioration.”

He added that the financial position was “not dissimilar” to a number of other CCGs in the region.

The main role of clinical commissioning groups is to identify and commission the most appropriate services to meet the health needs of the local population, which means Scarborough and Ryedale CCG commissions a number of services at Scarborough Hospital.

Carl Gavaghan, Local Democracy Reporting Service