A SHORTAGE of staff and lengthy waiting lists have put Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust in danger of missing its financial target.

Paying inflated wages for temporary staff while carrying out more non-elective procedures has led to 'concerns' that OUH could be overspent at year end and miss its target agreed with regulators.

Hitting the 'control total' target would open up doors to potentially vital national funding and further financial benefits for the trust.

Despite being in deficit in September, the trust, which runs the John Radcliffe Hospital and the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, was ahead of its plan agreed with NHS Improvement.

However, chief finance officer Jason Dorsett told OUH board members he had 'concerns' going into the winter period with the trust's hospitals expected to be placed under further pressure over the next few months.

Speaking at a meeting on Wednesday, Mr Dorsett said: "We are quite concerned that going into the second half of the year there could be a drop off in our [financial] performance.

"We’ve out-performed over the first few months and if we have a hiccup that’s OK but we can’t have a sustained underperformance over winter and still hit our financial plan."

NHS trusts are paid for each procedure carried out, with elective treatments (non emergency) being more lucrative.

However, a backlog of patients has led to the trust performing fewer elective procedures between March and September and an increase in non-elective care procedures, explained Mr Dorsett.

He said: "We are getting very very focussed on prioritising our capacity to treat the longest waiting patients.

"But that’s within the overall picture of treating fewer patients on aggregate than we hoped to in the elective area.

"As you might expect we’re treating slightly more non-elective patients than we thought.

"Also it won’t be a surprise that we have fewer staff than we hoped to have at this point in the year.

"We are mitigating that through the use of temporary staff and we're also managing it through focused work on deploying our staff where they are most needed to treat patients and keep beds open."

Overall, OUH has planned to deliver a control total requirement of a £25.7m surplus in 2018/19.

Last year, however, OUH failed to hit its 2017/18 financial target, ultimately missing out on around £15million worth of funding from the government's Sustainability and Transformation Fund (STF).