Shelford Group trust will run deficit for 'at least three more years'

In a paper to be presented at its board meeing tomorrow, Imperial College Healthcare Trust said it was working on a “longer term recovery plan” which would eliminate its run-rate deficit during 2020-21 and give a full-year surplus in 2021-22.

The London specialist trust is predicting a deficit of £25.1m in this financial year.

The papers included minutes of a sub-committee which said the ”executive team expressed some confidence that the planned margin improvement of £10m [in run-rate, per year] in the medium term was not unrealistic”.

Imperial has an annual turnover of more than £1bn and performs a significant amount of specialist work from its four main hospital sites in west London.

The board papers confirmed that the trust had a total backlog maintenance cost of £1.3bn - the largest in the NHS - and had requested £131m from NHS Improvement “to mitigate high and significant risk items” up to the end of 2021.

Imperial is working on a business case for funding to move services from its Western Eye Hospital site to its headquarters at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. The vacated Western Eye Hospital site would be worth a significant amount of money and the trust said Westminster Council had granted full planning permission for the development of the new building the eye services would move into.