The latest set of accounts for the body which oversees health and care services in Orkney has been described as “harrowing”.
Also described as “sobering”, the report was viewed by Orkney’s Integration Joint Board (IJB) this morning.
The IJB is made up of Orkney Council, NHS Orkney, and the Orkney Health and Care (OHAC) partnership.
Viewing a report on expenditure within the IJB’s services to the end of December, the board was presented with a barrage of overspend figures.
The members were told, at the moment, no short-term solutions can be offered.
These overspends include a forecast year-end overspend of £3.078m on what is called “services delegated” budget.
This is against a budget of £50.2m
There is also an overspend of £1.077m on its “set aside” budget. The budget set for this is £8.4m.
The services delegated budget covers the main services provided by the IJB.
This includes a wide range of services such as elderly and disabled care services.
The “set aside budget” covers things like acute services, assessment and rehab, and hospital drugs.
The reasons for overspending are varied.
However, Staff shortages and the resulting reliance on agency staff are the cause of predicted £423,000 and £385,000 overspends in disability and elderly people’s services, respectively.
The IJB vice chair, Orkney councillor Rachael King, called the financial figures “sobering.”
Forecast shows combined overspend of more than £4m
Shortly after the chairperson of NHS Orkney, Meghan McEwen added that she saw the report as “harrowing”.
Mrs McEwen asked the obvious question: How is the IJB going to address the overspending?
While grateful for the presentation of the figures she said she needed to understand what action was being taken to create a recovery plan.
For example, she noted the overspend in the children and families’ services is predicted to reduce from £885,000 to £200,000 by financial year-end.
However, she said there seemed to be no detail in the report as to what that recovery was based on.
She said: “My question is what’s being done with this info?
“What assurance can this committee take that appropriate actions are being taken at the right level at all sectors at all overspends to try and recover the situation?
In the absence of a chief financial officer for the IJB – which it doesn’t currently have – the head finance officers for NHS Orkney and Orkney council answered questions from the IJB members.
Part of the problem, they said, is that the IJB doesn’t have a CFO to set out the IJB’s finances.
NHS Orkney’s head of finance, Keren Somerville said, within the health body, there are reserves that could be used.
Meanwhile, the council’s head of finance Erik Knight said a number of factors needed to be taken into account.
This includes remembering they are not yet at the end of the financial year.
Financial year is not yet over says Orkney council’s head of finance
He said there are “timing issues” with budgets, in respect of some funding sources.
For example, this could mean funding sources may come in later than planned.
Mr Knight said the lack of CFO for the IJB meant the council and NHS sides were working “further apart”.
A “lack of knowledge” could be a cause of the Orkney Integration Joint Board’s current bleak financial picture.
With all this said, he added: “Notwithstanding those, there are significant financial issues facing both sides of the IJB.
“We are looking at various means to try and control those going forward.”
Mr Knight said the “two easiest” ways to resolve the situation would be to get more money – which he said they’d struggle with – or to reduce services.
The challenge with reducing the services, he said, is that they are required by the people using them.
He added: “It’s very hard to say to one person ‘you can get the service because you were here first’, but then to someone else, ‘you can’t get it because you were here second.’
“There are some significant pressures that we need to go through. I would like to hope once we get the new CFO in place we would come up with a plan.
“But at the moment, I have no short-term solutions to offer.”
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