Hospital bosses in charge of one of the country’s most struggling trusts say they are “on track” to deliver massive savings after a huge overspend.

East Kent Hospitals University Foundation Trust (EKHUFT) was told it needed to cut almost £50 million to help balance its books.

But despite meeting its targets to date, the trust is still expecting a deficit of £88.5m - an amount it had planned for at the start of the financial year.

In December last year, the then-chairman of the trust’s board of directors described the body as being among the “most challenged organisations” in the country.

Since 2021, the trust has been in level 4 of the NHS’s performance monitoring framework - the highest banding - which is applied to those "with the toughest challenges" and provides "intensive support" from the national organisation on finance and services.

The trust is one of the biggest in England and runs The William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent and Canterbury Hospital, Buckland Hospital in Dover, the Royal Victoria Hospital in Folkestone and QEQM in Margate.

At the start of the 2024/25 financial year in April, NHS England told EKHUFT it had to save £49m over the following 12 months.

At a meeting of the trust’s board of directors on December 5, new chief financial officer Angela van der Lem told members they were in fact doing better than planned for.

“We are expecting to deliver the full £49m cost improvement this year, having delivered £26m by month seven compared to £25.7m in the plan,” the former civil servant explained.

“Colleagues across the trust have been working to achieve this.

“We will need to continue delivering cost and productivity improvements as we work on the plan for the trust to track back to a financially sustainable position in the coming years.”

Previously, the trust’s reliance on agency staff had been described as one of the reasons for its overspending.

But a trust spokesperson explained: “Income from patient care has been higher than planned this year and the trust’s temporary staffing costs are lower than planned.

“We are supporting new ways of working to reduce reliance on temporary staffing.

“We have worked with our teams to target areas of long-term and high-cost temporary staffing.

“The turnover of permanent staff across the trust is currently the lowest it has been in over two years and continues to improve.”

In August, the trust reported it had gone £45m over its originally planned deficit of £72m in 2023/24 bringing the total overspend in the year to £117m.

Since then it has been establishing ways - such as its cost-saving measures - to bring that down.

The latest papers for EKHUFT’s budget for 2024/25 show it still expects to meet its planned £88.5m loss this year.