Directors held their latest board meeting at the Cumberland Infirmary on Wednesday March 25, receiving reports from its committees about their work in recent weeks.
And in one report, the board heard about the efforts of the Audit and Risk Committee to reduce unnecessary costs to the trust incurred through the writing-off of expired medicines and bad debts.
A hospital ward. (Image: NCIC)
In her report to the board, Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee Margie Burdis said: “We’ve seen on the committee, obviously hospitals and organisations have to hold medical supplies and what we were seeing is, once they expire they can’t be used and they’re written off and that’s a cost.
She said: “Not that the process wasn’t right but we were seeing, every time there is more write-offs, which is obviously a cost out of the system, so we asked that it could be looked at but what I will say is, we did receive a separate assurance that said we’re still in the lower quartile of organisations writing off medicines.”
“So it’s not that we have a bigger problem than anybody, we actually have a lower problem but we did think it needed to be looked at just for assurance.”
The report from the March 11 Audit and Risk Committee notes that a review will be carried out to minimise write-off of financial losses from expired medicines.
Bad debts totalling £23.9k were wrote off by the NHS trust in March.
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“And linked to that really,” Ms Burdis said, “the bad debts for overseas visitors that we treated at the hospitals, we were seeing that as quite high as well, so we did advise on that but we were assured that the new Overseas Visitor Manager that had been appointed was looking at this and everything that we were writing-off wasn’t recoverable and would have cost more to continue.”
Visitors to England must pay for the majority of NHS services, unless they have an exemption.
In some cases, the NHS trust was unable to recover the cost of a visitor’s healthcare before they left the country.
NCIC wrote off £19,000 of these bad debts in March 2026.
Overseas visitors who are exempt from paying for NHS care whilst in England are asylum seekers, people who have paid the immigration health surcharge as part of their visa application, some types of detainees, victims of modern slavery and those covered by international healthcare arrangements.