Kingston Hospital’s new chief executive has vowed to fight to expand its maternity unit and wring better value for money from the trust’s financially stricken wards.

Ann Radmore has been acting as interim chief executive since August and officially took the full-time job last month when former boss Kate Grimes confirmed she would not be returning due to ill health.

It has not been a smooth ride for the former head of the London Ambulance Service. She left in January last year during a crisis of poor emergency response times and ahead of the publication of a report detailing a bullying culture at the trust.

In just her first three months at Kingston Ms Radmore was forced to admit the accident and emergency department was “extremely fragile” even before the winter rush, and to face down investigators from the health regulator Monitor who had been called in over the hospital’s projected £8.8 million deficit and excessive emergency waiting times. But that number is coming down thanks to savvy spending.

Ms Radmore said: “Sometimes you need agency staff but we are looking into ways where we don’t have to pay the astronomical fees to the agency. We are working with neighbouring hospitals St George’s, St Helier and Croydon to get better deals for all of us and increase our spending power. And we are looking at buying generic instead of branded drugs.”

One area where Ms Radmore is battling to expand, using a central Government fund, is the maternity unit, which her predecessor admitted in 2015 was “significantly under funded”.

She said: “We are often at capacity and that is a problem. We have a waiting list of staff who want to join our maternity wing, which is a great place to be in. The staff really make the maternity unit.”

Fifteen years ago the hospital was forced to radically change the way it ran the department when an inquiry into the death of a baby girl found understaffing was a key issue. In 2009 it faced accusations that nurses were overstretched due to understaffing. Now the unit, which delivers about 6,000 babies per year, is fully staffed and was voted the best in London by expectant mothers.

But Ms Radmore said: “Where we do have trouble is care for the elderly jobs, both doctors and nurses. Here we serve an ageing population and it is not unusual to have a few people on a ward of over 100. We need to recruit staff to accommodate that.

“I also think the areas where we have been pushing recruitment we have seen better morale. There is a real link between having permanent staff on a ward and staff being happy in their jobs.”

Recruiting permanent staff rather than relying on expensive temps from agencies has been one of the ways the hospital has brought down its predicted deficit, employing more than 100 full-time nurses, many from abroad.

Ms Radmore has seen five periods of industrial action by junior doctors since January.

She said: “The junior doctors absolutely have a right to strike. Because we have had so much notice of the strikes we have not been too badly affected and our senior doctors have also been wonderful.

“I also absolutely fully support the idea of a seven-day working hospitals over all departments and I think that is something Kingston is moving slowly towards."