Updated
Tuesday, 16th March 2021, 1:58 pm
The target was agreed at a board meeting of the region’s integrated care system (ICS), at which one hospital boss warned that the scale of the task meant “difficult decisions” would have to be made about the services on offer in different localities.
Board members signed up to the savings tally – which amounts to five percent of total NHS expenditure across the patch – after hearing an estimate that the collective deficit of healthcare organisations in the area could be as high as £340m.
The financial issues facing the region long predate the pandemic. In March 2020, just as the full impact of Covid began to be felt, the forecast budget shortfall already stood at £277m – and that was even after planned savings of £163m had been factored in for the year ahead.