It was revealed that the health service will have to reduce monthly overspends by almost half over the next five months if they are to meet the budgeted £53m deficit.

Finance chief Derek Lindsay told Ayrshire and Arran Health Board that the organisation had overspent by £37.6m in the seven months up to October.

In order to achieve the £53m approved at the start of the financial year, they will have to reduce the monthly overspend to £3.18m.

Officials have regularly warned that worsening financial performance comes with the threat that NHS Scotland could take over running the service directly.

However, Chief Executive Claire Burden told board members: "The update from the Scottish Government is that we need to continue with the plan that we've got for the ambition of achieving the revenue plan that we've put in place.

"So I wanted to reassure the board that the plan remains the plan. We are behind and the expectation is that we continue on our recovery trajectory."

The service controversially brought in consultants in a bid to find areas that could return savings, utilising funds from the Scottish Government.

Although there has been little improvement in terms of overspends, Ms Burden insisted the consultants would be retained.

She said: "While the cost reduction and efficiency saving programme remains under pressure and is behind, they will continue to work."

As well as telling NHS A&A to maintain its course, the Scottish Government has eased restrictions, allowing the organisation to include one-off savings against the overspend.

However, Ms Burden added: "But we will work together to make more solid the delivery plans that we have, their work on mitigations, and also the government has agreed that we can place non-recurrent savings.

"That will provide another opportunity for mitigations to get us closer to the plan. Obviously, we want as many recurrence savings as possible but we don't want to roll forward with any more pressure that we're already going to have in 2025.

Mr Lindsay gave a breakdown of the overspends:

He added: "We do also have overspends on emergency departments and combined assessment units as demands on those services required additional staffing within those areas.

"We also have an overspend of 4.6 million per year to date on the new medicines fund, and are projecting that will increase to £7.2 million pounds by the year end. We've spent about a million pounds a month on unfunded beds."

However, Mr Lindsay did point out that the picture was improving after an initial rise in the summer.

He said: "In November, we did close ward 3F, which is a 12-bedded ward at Crosshouse."

He said that the reduction should reduce the monthly spend on unfunded beds by about £300k a month.