THE district's health system has to find ways to save almost £100 million in the next four years, a meeting heard.

The scale of the deficit facing the local NHS and social care system was laid bare at a meeting of the district’s Health and Wellbeing Board.

The board heard that tough decisions would need to be made, with hospitals facing the largest funding gap.

Finance chiefs told the board that nationally the NHS needed to close a £22bn deficit by 2020/21, which meant a £1bn funding gap for West Yorkshire and a £221m gap for the district.

Julie Lawreniuk, chief financial officer for the district’s three NHS clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), said the CCGs had £800m to spend each year and while that amount was not being cut, it was not “keeping pace with demand, expectations and technology”.

She said local health organisations had already found ways to save, which amounted to £106m.

She said they were anticipating £18m of extra funding to plug part of the gap, but now needed to come up with a plan to close the rest of it.

It means the district’s three CCGs still need to find £17m of savings and the trusts which provide acute care – mainly hospitals – need to find £46m of extra savings.

And Stuart McKinnon-Evans, director of finance at Bradford Council, said the local authority was looking at cuts of around £35m to the amount it spent on health and social care.

Mr McKinnon-Evans said unlike the NHS, local authorities were seeing significant budget reductions.

He said so far, they had managed to make the required savings, “but it just gets harder”.

The meeting heard the hospitals had already identified around £47m of savings they could make, through reduced spending on drugs, controls on agency staff, reducing administration costs, boosting workforce productivity and more.

But with a similar sum still to find, they might have to make more drastic change.