A TEAM of financial experts has been called in by the NHS trust which looks after the QEII Hospital in Welwyn Garden City to help overhaul an £18.5 million cash crisis.

The East and North Herts Trust has enlisted the help of a financial recovery team from Price WaterHouseCoopers to help formulate a plan which will see the debt reduced by £8.5 million in the next 12 months. Hospital bosses insist the savings will not lead to cuts in services, but admit it will lead to changes in the way some services are delivered.

A trust spokesman said this could mean more patients going home on the same day as surgery and an increase in the number of people who are treated outside hospital through the use of carers and district nurses.

The spokesman added: "People will not have to stay as long in hospital now which has been proved to be best practice. Elderly people in particular prefer to get their care closer to home once they have come into hospital for their acute medical requirements."

PricewaterHouseCoopers will be looking at all aspects of how the trust conducts its business. As well as looking at how services are provided, it will investigate how the trust might be able to attract more income and possible savings through better energy efficiency.

The team of seven experts is expected to cost the trust around £250,000 over the next six weeks. A trust spokesman said the costs would be covered in the huge savings expected to be made.

Since 2000 the cost of providing hospital services has regularly been higher than the funding received from the Primary Care Trust. (PCT). This gap was identified at between £10 and £15 million each year and was usually covered by the sale of land which was no longer used by the NHS or the transfer of funds between the PCT and NHS.

Over the last few years the trust has made several changes to the way services are provided and closed wards at the QEII in a bid to make extra savings.

However, financial forecasts predict the final end of year position for 2004/05 will be a deficit of about £8.5 million with a further £10 million predicted for next year.

The trust has now been asked by the Strategic Health Authority (SHA) to reduce this debt to a manageable £10 million by next year a saving of £8.5 million over the next 12 months.

It is hoped the trust will reach a financial balance of zero by the end of 2007/08.

A spokesman for the trust said: "Over the last three years the trust has picked all the low hanging fruit, the challenge facing the organisation is now to tackle the underlying structural financial problem.

"While work on tackling this issue did begin some time ago this was made more difficult by the huge workload that was undertaken by the trust to sort out the operational and managerial problems that had beset the trust up to 2003."