NHS Fife missed targets for treating cancer patients and those attending A&E while running up a £10.6million overspend in their hospitals.

Bed-blocking remains a huge problem and figures presented at last week’s board meeting outlined a catalogue of delays and long waiting times.

However, health chiefs did balance the books without a Scottish Government bail-out and despite the acute services division’s massive plunge into the red, believe the overall picture will improve.

They admitted in January that the division’s performance – it runs both the Victoria and Queen Margaret hospitals – “remains the greatest financial challenge”.

And in a report to the board last week, director of finance Chris Bowring said, “The acute services division is reporting an overspend of £10.6m for the year, with the underlying variance being driven largely by staffing costs: medical locums within women and children’s services, orthopaedics, theatres and anaesthetics and across emergency care, use of the nurse bank to cover sickness and vacancies; and the costs associated with additional surge capacity for which there is no associated funding source.” Overall, NHS Fife ended the 2014-15 financial year in the black but this was largely achieved by bringing forward £1.5m from the 2015-16 budget.

The health board has been under pressure in the past 12 months with MSP Alex Rowley highlighting its “failures” in the Scottish Parliament, unannounced inspections raising serious concerns about standards of care and its own chairman, Allan Burns, admitting that “Fife remains one of the worst delayed discharge areas in Scotland”.

He also said it was costing them £3.6m a year and the board and Fife Council told the Scottish Government they needed more money to deal with the social care issue.

A new target was introduced last month which said no-one should wait more than 14 days to be discharged from hospital once treatment is completed.

The total number in delay at the end of March in Fife was 90 with 26 having waited more than two weeks to leave hospital.

In a report, interim chief executive Brian Montgomery said, “The vast majority of delays continue to be attributable to the completion of pre-assessment and assessment of home care and residential care and the commissioning of packages of care.” In total, there were 10,279 admissions to NHS Fife hospitals in January and February.

Waiting times in A&E has been a consistent problem with Fife failing to meet the Scottish Government target of seeing 98 per cent of patients within four hours. An interim target of 95 per cent has also proved hard to reach. Just 90.9 per cent were treated within the target time in December and Mr Montgomery said, “Performance against the four-hour treatment target has degraded over recent months and the rolling annual average, in common with a number of other mainland health boards, has dropped beneath the 95 per cent target.” Two key targets for cancer care were also missed.

For the quarter ending December 2014, 13 out of 164 patients suspected to have cancer were not seen within the 62-day target.

And 10 patients out of 270 diagnosed with cancer were treated outwith the 31-day target.

NHS Fife also failed to meet the 62-day target in January and February, and the 31-day target in January, and said, “Breaches are in the main due to the continuing issues in urology and the capacity issues with lung oncology appointments.” Health boards are expected to have no patients waiting more than 12 weeks from referral to first outpatient appointment.

At the end of February, NHS Fife had more than 2500.

For diagnostic tests, health boards are expected to maintain a six-week maximum wait for barium studies, non-obstetric ultrasound, CT scans, MRI scans, upper and lower endoscopy, colonoscopy and cystoscopy.

At the end of February, there were 5119 patients waiting for one of these diagnostic tests with 593 having waited more than six weeks.

Health boards are also expected to have no patients waiting more than nine weeks for elective surgery.

At the end of February, there were 278 patients who had waited more than nine weeks – more than double the figure for February 2014.

There were 22 breaches in January of the patient treatment time guarantee of starting treatment within 12 weeks, with 35 in February and 36 in March. On the standard of treating 90 per cent of patients within 18 weeks of referral, the board said they had fallen beneath the standard since September last year and “performance has continued to fall”.

Figures showed that the number of patients waiting for a new outpatient consultation was, at the end of February, 16,304.

This was 14 per cent higher than at the same date last year. But the board was successful in ensuring that 90 per cent of clients waited no longer than three weeks from referral for appropriate drug and alcohol treatment.

Against increased demand, NHS Fife has been well above the standard in each quarter since March 2013.