Patient care at an Oxford hospital could be put at risk because other cash-strapped NHS organisations are eating into its budget.

The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Headington has received less money than expected this year, because the cash has been ploughed into other parts of the health service.

Although the NOC was solvent at the end of the last financial year, the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, responsible for the city's John Radcliffe, Churchill, and Radcliffe Infirmary and The Horton Hospital, Banbury, was £20m in debt.

The trust has already made three per cent savings on its £50m budget.

But managers must make further 2.5 per cent savings, because a £1.2m allocation for extra work has been cut by half, and £200,000 has been lost because of cuts in primary care trust funding.

In a report to board members, NOC chief executive Ed Macalister-Smith said: "The financial difficulties in Oxfordshire means the NOC is being denied the funds it needs.

"I'm not blaming other organisations because they have difficulties that we don't have to manage.

"We're going to try and reduce as much as we possibly can, like what we spend on agency staffing.

"I'm going to be extremely reluctant to allow any kind of patient services to be negatively affected, but I can't guarantee that."

A spokesman for the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals said the final budgets had not yet been drawn up.

She said: "The fact that there is an Oxfordshire-wide deficit means there are discussions about where investment goes or does not go, and the ORH is part of these discussions."