Fife health partnership faces £11m overspend

The region’s Integrated Joint Board – which is a partnership between Fife Council and NHS Fife – is now £11.27m over budget this year.

The figure was given to members at Tuesday’s board meeting.

In March, the IJB agreed to approve a budget overspend of £6m in place of cutting health services.

But board members were told that now this had increased by £4.72m.

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Main areas of overspend were GP over-prescription, at £1m and adult care packages at £3.68m.

However, board members were told the latter had already been reduced from £6m down to just £1m.

Councillor Tim Brett said: “The service is clearly under a huge amount of pressure, and we need to find ways of pulling this back.

“We are only currently allocating adult packages to very high risk individuals, and the concern is that there will be even more people coming through.”

Julie Paterson, divisional general manager, confirmed the increasing pressure on resources “hence the bigger pressure on the budget.”

The report to the IJB added that a recovery plan must be put into place to balance the budget.

It is expected that this plan will come to a future meeting for approval.

NHS Fife and Fife Council both take some financial responsibility if the budget is unbalanced by the end of the financial year.