Agenda item

The Board had before it a report by Gillian Parkin (Finance, NHS Grampian) and Jimmie Dickie (Finance, ACC) which (1) summarised the current year revenue budget performance for the services within the remit of the IJB as at Period 6; (2) advised on any areas of risk and management action relating to the revenue budget performance of the IJB services; and (3) requested approval of budget virements so that budgets were more closely aligned to anticipated income and expenditure.

The report recommended:-

That the Board –

(a)          Note the report in relation to the IJB budget and the information on areas of risk and management action that are contained therein;

(b)          Note the work undertaken by officers to reduce the overspend position forecast in June 2017 had been offset by new budget pressures identified in the prescribing budget;

(c)          Instruct officers to review the financial position and continue to identify savings to bring the mainstream budget back to a break even position; and

(d)          Approve the budget virements indicated in Appendix E.

The Chief Finance Officer advised that the Partnership had reduced the projected overspend from £4.5m in June to £2.8m in September. He highlighted that the Partnership had established Resource Allocation and Vacancy Management Panels to review where further efficiencies could be made. Mr Stephen explained that adverse movements had been recorded in the prescribing budget particularly for mental health medicines which had recently been in short supply and this had pushed up drug prices.

Thereafter there were questions and comments on (1) savings which could be made through hosted services; (2) the level of overspend on out of authority treatments (3) the level of learning disabilities overspend and how the Partnership engages with the Council’s Education and Children’s Services Directorate to manage a young person’s transition from children’s to adult social care; (4) the impact of efficiency savings on staff and service users; (5) the level of spend taken from the transformation fund for transformational purposes; (6) the impact of off patent drugs on prescribing costs; (7) the overspend on commissioned services with specific reference to the under recovery of client and customer receipts in residential and nursing care; and (8) ongoing work being carried out by the NHS on mitigating prescribing costs.

The Board resolved:-

(i)           to note the report in relation to the IJB budget and the information on areas of risk and management action that are contained therein;

(ii)           to commend the work undertaken by officers to reduce the overspend position forecast in June 2017 had been offset by new budget pressures identified in the prescribing budget;

(iii)         to instruct officers to review the financial position and continue to identify savings to bring the mainstream budget back to a break even position;

(iv)         to approve the budget virements indicated in Appendix E;

(v)           to request a workshop session on hosted services;

(vi)         to instruct the Chief Finance Officer to present figures to the next meeting of the APS Committee on the level of spend taken from the transformation fund for transformational purposes;

(vii)        to circulate a report prepared  by the six NHS Directors of Pharmacy across the North East of Scotland to provide further detail on issues relating to prescribing;

(viii)       to re-circulate the Prescribing paper presented to the IJB on 7 March 2017; and

(ix)         to revise the name of future financial monitoring reports to ‘Financial Control Report’.