Hospital in the black despite financial pressure

East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the Conquest on The Ridge, said a number of things, such as the snow and norovirus outbreak, had put pressure on the organisation's purse strings throughout the last year.

Andy Horne, the trust's interim director of finance and investment, said: "We were able to achieve a 51,000 surplus at the end of the financial year on March 31 but we were aiming for that figure to be 1 million.

"The incidents we had in January and February this year, namely the snow and outbreak of norovirus knocked us off course.

"The cold weather caused a significant number of patients' operations being cancelled due to the difficulties around both staff and patients getting to hospital.

"Also by last summer the trust had overspent by 3 million and we were running a deficit of 600 a month.

"We were forecasting a 7 million deficit by the end of this year (March 31, 2010) so we were in real trouble early in the financial year."

But he said at Wednesday's board meeting that savings made later in the year had turned things around.

Robert Smart, non-executive director, said: "Everybody in the trust should be congratulated considering where we were last year."

Darren Grayson, the trust's new chief executive, said: "We all need to be able to achieve this every year."