The chair of Norfolk's biggest hospital is expecting its deficit to grow to £12.5m – nearly £3m more than the 2014/15 financial year.

The news came as the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital produced its annual report for the year ending March 2015, at a meeting of the trust board yesterday.

Keeping a watching eye over the meeting was Mark Davies, who on Wednesday, was appointed interim chief executive of the hospital, as it searches for a permanent replacement to Anna Dugdale.

Mr Davies heard about some of the challenges the hospital has faced, including a failure to meet several key targets, as well as suffering a financial deficit of £9.6m in 2014/15.

The hospital's chairman John Fry, said: 'It has been a challenging year for all of us with too much pressure on the staff, and where our services have come under intense pressure, making it difficult to achieve key targets.

'There is hard work going on to get our performance back on track and the significant planning and improvements, and key initiatives already in place have begun to make a difference. We will push hard to reduce the forecasted deficit.'

Over the 2014/15 year 74.8pc of people had to wait longer than 62 days to receive treatment from their first GP referral for suspected cancer – lower than the target of 85pc. The subsequent 31 day surgery target recorded 87.1pc which is lower than the 94pc.

While there have been improvements for patient cancellations on the day of surgery, acting chief executive, Richard Parker said the hospital is looking to increase theatre operating times and bring in more staff to reduce these numbers further.

He said: 'Work to reduce cancellations especially due to the lack of beds, has demonstrated significant improvements from the end of last year. Any cancellation on the day is not acceptable and we will work to improve this and surgery delays. We will look at how we can schedule surgeries better and make better use of operating theatres, by opening the operating window including opening more operating theatres over a weekend.'

The hospital had as many as 177 surgery cancellations in January this year – 135 of which due to shortage in beds. Figures for June showed a total of 83 cancellations.