ALMOST £3.5 million was spent on paying temporary staff at Worcestershire’s three acute staff in June as the organisation running the sites falls further behind its financial plans.

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has been struggling financially for some time and ended the 2014-15 financial year £25.9 million in the red – more than twice the £9.8 million deficit it had predicted at the start of the year.

Although the trust, which runs Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Kidderminster Hospital and Redditch’s Alexandra Hospital, predicted at the start of the current fiscal year it would be £31.3 million in deficit by next March, it has already fallen behind its plans and is currently £12.7 million in the red – £2.4 million worse-off than it had planned.

The figures have been put down to a combination of factors including the increasing amount the organisation has been forced to rely on expensive temporary staff, with the trust currently having almost 100 vacancies for nursing staff alone.

A consistently high amount of patients has also hit the trust’s finances as the organisation has been unable to carry out elective operations which would otherwise have provided NHS income and it has also been forced to pay out hefty fines to the county’s three Clinical Commissioning Groups for missing NHS targets around measures such as operation waiting lists, with penalties over the past year alone totalling £1.5 million.

Speaking a meeting of the trust’s board earlier today non-executive director Bryan McGinity called the figures “totally unacceptable”.

“We had hoped to get additional capital through the Trust Development Authority,” he said.

“But that hasn’t happened.”

But his colleague Andrew Sleigh said he believed the problem was not insurmountable.

“If we could have avoided fines and dealt with the bed occupancy problem we would have been £200,000 ahead of plan,” he said.

“If we can get a grip on a few things we can get through this.”

But he added he was not pleased the trust was already planning to end the year £31.3 million in the red.

“It’s just not acceptable to have this performance,” he said.

“We have to eat into it.”

The trust’s acting chief executive Chris Tidman – standing in for chief executive Penny Venables, who has been on sick leave since April – said the organisation also needed to take control of its recruitment.

“We know we are entirely too reliant on temporary staffing,” he said. “That has been a trend throughout the last year.”

Full reports from today's meeting – including a detailed breakdown of the trust’s finances – are available at www.worcsacute.nhs.uk.