MILLIONS of pounds of debt have finally been wiped out at North Yorkshire’s NHS trust as health chiefs revealed their latest financial rundown.

New accounts published for NHS North Yorkshire and York show the organisation has met its goal of ridding itself of a massive cash deficit.

Now its bosses say they are looking to the future and identifying ways of ploughing extra investment into health services after shedding a legacy which cast an unwelcome shadow over the trust’s finances – and led to controversial steps being taken to combat it.

When North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust (PCT) – the previous guise of NHS North Yorkshire and York – was created in October 2006, it inherited £45 million of debt incurred by the region’s former health trusts.

The measures taken to reduce that over the following years included wide-ranging and unpopular cuts in services and mothballing new projects in an attempt to make savings as a target date to achieve “financial balance” was set for March 2009.

Now the trust’s accounts – included in documents which went before a public board meeting last week – for 2008-09 have revealed that aim has been met. “Over the last financial year, NHS North Yorkshire and York and all of our partners in the local health community have worked hard to achieve financial balance,” said its chief executive, Jayne Brown, who took over the role from her controversial predecessor Dr Janet Soo-Chung, during the last financial year. “It is pleasing that we have managed to achieve our aim. However, we must not be complacent and we must look to consolidate and build on the position we are now in.

“Every year, NHS North Yorkshire and York spends more than £1.2 billion on NHS services for the local population and we must ensure that we are not only offering local people high-quality services, but also ones which provide value for money.

“The more efficient the local NHS is, the more opportunities we have to invest that money in new services – for example, bringing services closer to people’s homes.”

Among the money-saving measures introduced during Dr Soo-Chung’s time at the helm were suspending a string of hospital procedures and scans, such as pain-relieving joint injections, IVF treatment, bunion surgery and vasectomies.

GPs who felt patients urgently needed these treatments were asked to send them to a Prior Approval Panel of PCT staff, which had the power to reject or approve cases based on how “exceptional” they were.

But doctors reacted angrily to the system, saying it could have serious repercussions for patient care and even put lives at risk.

Last December, a report by the Audit Commission revealed the trust was £18.2 million in deficit at the end of the 2007-08 financial year – the largest figure of any PCT in the country – although this overspend had been reduced to £2.2 million by last autumn.