THE trust which runs Basingstoke hospital has finished the year nearly £4million in debt following a challenging year.

Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (HHFT), which runs Basingstoke, Andover and Winchester hospitals, ended the year with a £3.9m deficit for the financial year, compared to a predicted surplus of £1.5m, meaning the trust has ended the year £5.4m behind its target.

Staff costs were £2m above the plan in March and £8.9m in total which is four per cent above the trust's plan for the year, with an increase in the number of agency staff blamed to ensure patients are cared for.

Agency costs during March totalled £900,000 in March, bringing the total cost of agency staff this year to £3.9m compared to just £700,000 last year.

It has also emerged that HHFT has been fined more than £1.6m for the year to date by the local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), after incurring financial penalties for missing targets relating to referral to treatment times, Emergency Department waiting times, ambulance handover times and other challenges.

The single biggest financial penalty related to ambulance handover waiting times.

Although the numbers are starting to improve, 46 patients waited more than 30 minutes to be transferred from an ambulance, with 26 incidents occurring at Basingstoke hospital and 20 at Winchester during March. In total, during the month 38 patients waited more than 30 minutes and eight patients waited more than 60 minutes, and the trust was fined £12,000.

HHFT was also fined £50,000 for the month for breaching the referral to treatment 18-week target in March.

In total, for the year to date, HHFT was fined £1,695,000 in contractual penalties.

Chief executive of HHFT, Mary Edwards, told The Gazette that the fall in contractual penalties showed that the trust is "getting better", adding: "It is disappointing but we know that a large proportion of that was because we had to use agency and bank staff to open up beds and also we planned to reduce the number of beds last summer but the pressure was already mounting.

"In total, across the whole organisation, we had 48 beds open which we planned to close during the summer and we added an additional 60 beds so that is an extra 108 beds we hadn't planned on. The real cost of beds is the staff to look after the patients so it was a real driver for the financial problems."