Hospital's £14m bailout cannot be repeated - CEO

A £14m bailout given to a hospital that faced a £26m deficit cannot be repeated next year, health bosses have warned.

In 2024 West Suffolk Hospital, in Bury St Edmunds, predicted it would be £28.5m in debt, which has since reduced to about £26.5m.

The hospital has been given £14m by the NHS Suffolk and North East Essex Integrated Care Board (ICB), which manages the funding for all health care in the county, but the board said it could not afford to do the same next year.

Dr Ewen Cameron, the chief executive of West Suffolk Hospital, said although it had made "substantial progress" towards reducing the debt, it would take two years to regain financial stability.

Dr Cameron said in June it appeared the hospital deficit could be as high as £40m, but he said it now looked like it would be about £26.5m.

"It's still a really huge challenge but an awful lot of work has been done over the last six or seven months to try to get things back under control," he said.

"Over the last five years we have significantly grown - particularly our workforce has grown by about 1,000 over five years and without the funding to pay for that being recurrent, or without delivering the efficiencies we'd need to cover the costs... so it's really important we are starting to make very significant progress to tackle this.

"Clearly there are things we should have done over the previous few years to make ourselves more efficient and we are taking the hard decisions to do that necessary work now.

"We have had to make a small number of redundancies - we will be working wherever we can to avoid that but it's really important that we get back to a sustainable position so that we don't need these costs to be covered by other parts of the healthcare system."

Dr Cameron added: "It is being turned around and progress that's been made this year is really substantial, but I don't think it's possible for us to be back to a balanced position in 12 months.

"I still think it will take us two years to get back to that position.

"There's a really big challenge to make the organisation sustainable whilst delivering the healthcare services that the people of west Suffolk need and deserve and how things will be covered over the next two years is to be worked through."

Dr Ed Garratt, the chief executive of the local ICB which is providing the £14m bailout, praised Dr Cameron for the "good job" he was doing at the hospital trust.

"He's inherited this challenge and he's grasped it very well and is very determined to turn it around," said Dr Garrett.

"But yes, the hospital is overspending. We are looking to correct the position."

Dr Garrett said the £14m had come out of a contingency fund and no services would be withdrawn as a result of using that money.

"Obviously we could have used to money to put additional resources into services but we're not withdrawing services as result of this.

"We cannot, however, continue to do this year-on-year," he added.

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