PATIENTS in Gwent are not to suffer in spite of a health trust overspend last year of more than £5 million, its finance director says.

And Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust's Andrew Cottom says there are currently no proposals to make staff redundant to save money, something happening in other NHS trusts across the UK.

He said: "There are no plans, as we speak, for redundancies."

Mr Cottom admitted the trust faced a "difficult" 12 months because of its debt, but said there were no plans to make savings which would directly affect patients.

He said he was drawing up a package of proposals that would instead improve efficiency and cut the cost of services.

A report from the Wales Audit Office today warns that Welsh NHS trusts overspent by more than £22 million last year and that Health Commission Wales was over budget by £10 million. There is also a historic debt of around £80 million across the country.

The Gwent trust overspent by just £74,000 for the 2004-05 financial year, but that leapt to more than £5 million for 2005-06. The new pay structures for NHS staff brought in under the Assembly's Agenda for Change programme accounted for much of the debt.

Mr Cottom said: "Our target is to break even this financial year. "At the moment we are not talking about impacting directly on patient care. Our focus, as we stand at the moment, is on improving efficiency and reducing the cost of services.

"We are concerned that this coming year is going to be very difficult, but we are not at the point where we should say people in Gwent should be concerned and we are hoping the action we can take will ensure we do not impact on patient care."

Mr Cottom added that between 70 per cent and 75 per cent of the trust's costs went on staffing.

He said: "It is inevitable that if we're reducing costs, then that will impact on staffing issues. That could be overtime and we have high agency costs, which we want to address."