DORSET County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is preparing for a deficit of £9.1 million this year, it has been revealed.

The trust confirmed the figure for 2016/17 whilst declaring it had ended the last financial year, which ended in March, with a deficit of £5.5million.

Plans are in place to make savings through efficiencies and looking at alternative ways of delivering services, which don’t compromise on the quality.

The figures were released on the same day regular NHS Improvement published national figures.

The sector as a whole ended 2015/16 in deficit for the second successive year, with a deficit of £2.45 billion. This was £461 million worse than planned.

Out of 240 NHS providers, 157 reported a deficit of whom the majority were acute trusts.

Providers made £2.9 billion of savings, which is £316 million less than planned.

The NHS provider sector as a whole missed the A&E waiting time target of seeing 95 per cent of patients within four hours between January and March this year.

The sector as a whole spent £3.64 billion on agency and contract staff which is £1.4 billion more than planned.

Patricia Miller, chief executive of Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said the trust was hoping to receive additional funding later this year.

She said: “The NHS as a whole ended 2015/16 with a deficit of £2.45billion so our financial position is in line with the national picture.

“All of our staff are very focussed and are working extremely hard to make efficiencies within their services to meet our cost improvement plans but we still have more work to do.

“We are hopeful that some additional funding may be made available to the NHS in Dorset later this year.

“In the meantime our Trust Board members are very clear – we are not prepared to compromise on the quality of services we provide.

“The cost savings we need to make will be through efficiencies and looking at ways to deliver services differently.

“Dorset’s Clinical Services Review and our Vanguard partnership with our neighbouring acute hospitals give us a good opportunity to deliver our aims of providing high quality, sustainable services for our patients into the future.”