THE NHS TAYSIDE Board yesterday signed off the accounts on their £750m budget to the year ending March 31, 2007 at a meeting in Kings Cross Hospital.

Director of finance David Clark revealed that half the annual expenditure is swallowed up by staffing costs.

The accounts show an underspend of around £3m, or half a per cent of the total budget, which will be carried forward.

Mr Clark told the board that while the submission of the final annual accounts is a critical statutory process, it should be looked at as “the financial representation of providing services to the people of Tayside and north east Fife.

“Statutory targets have been achieved, as they have been in every year since the unified board was formed.

“Staff have all contributed greatly to achieving this result, it is very much a team game.”

He said among the significant items of expenditure the budget had to deal with was a drugs bill of £100m for the year—a spending rate of almost £2m a week.

He again stressed it was not just about money, but also about patient services.

“Clearly there can be demands that can arise that take you away from individual money targets but somehow you have to try to balance it out fairly.

“There can be expensive treatments for an individual patient, but it is about targeting resources, taking account of clinical advice.”

He said he was confident that a structure had been established so staff took strategic account of monetary systems and monthly reviews placed before the board contributed to expenditure control.

Asked if the partnership with the private sector at Stracathro would have an impact on future budgets, he said annual expenditure in the region of £5m had to be seen in the context of the overall annual spend of three quarters of a billion.