GREATER Glasgow Health Board confirmed yesterday that Rutherglen Maternity Hospital may have to close within months to save the Victoria Infirmary Trust from collapse.

Closing Rutherglen three years early emerged yesterday as the only palatable strategy to deal with the yawning chasm in the Trust's finances, now thought to exceed #2.5m.

Board members were told yesterday that they did not have any money to bale out the Victoria, but the Trust was in talks with the NHS Management Executive in Edinburgh seeking a financial lifeline.

Meanwhile, managers were officially informing the Rutherglen staff of what they had read in The Herald a fortnight ago - that the hospital may have to be sacrificed to meet the crisis.

The finance director, Mr Brian Johnson, was suspended when the size of the deficit - said to have surprised both the Trust and the Health Board - was uncovered by the Trust's auditors. The board, which does not meet again until August, agreed to the formation of an ad-hoc committee to deal with the situation as it develops.

Last year, 2652 babies were born at Rutherglen but the announcement by Health Minister Sam Galbraith on Monday, giving the go-ahead for the new Royal Maternity Hospital, has removed any uncertainty about redistributing Rutherglen's patients betwen the existing Royal and the Southern General. There is enough accommodation at Rottenrow - subject to some alterations - to share the load until the new hospital opens in three years' time.

The alternatives, said the board's chief executive, Chris Spry, would be to cut essential services at the Victoria or to review completely the board's acute services strategy - by implication, to close the Victoria completely.

The chairman, Sir Robert Calderwood, said: ''This is not the way we had planned things to develop. I said six months ago that I did not want to wake up one morning and hear on the radio that a Trust has run into financial difficulties and taken us by surprise. I am very saddened by what has happened. It is the saddest debate in which I have had to take part as chairman of the health board.''

Mr Spry said: ''If we did not pursue this it might lead to alternatives which are bleak and uncertain. You could go in by the time-honoured way and cut capacity here and there to save money. That smacks of the knee-jerk and is certainly a strategic response.

''If the Trust continues to haemorrhage in this way things will get worse, not better. The Trust are speaking to the staff at Rutherglen. It is important that the staff do not read about this in the newspapers.

''The depth of the crisis was unknown to the Trust itself until the auditors came in. Last autumn I was shown a spreadsheet by the Trust which showed how the then problem of meeting pay awards was going to be met. It showed a projection of the Trust's income and expenditure over a three-year period. What we see now was not signalled in these papers at all.''

He added that the Trust had not been spending as much as it should have on maintenance.

Board member, Professor Gordon Dickson, said the Trust's accountability should be looked at: ''A loss of this size is staggering.''

The board's newly-appointed director of finance, Mr Scott Haldane, said: ''We do not know what the precise deficit is but when the auditors are finished next week we will have a definitive figure. The issue of governance will be taken up by the management executive, and the question of how the position was not made known until the external auditors came in. There are systems in place in all organisations for predicting the out-turn.''

He confirmed that the gap was a recurring one which would be repeated year on year, whereas the trust had been meeting it for several years with non-recurring savings.

''It appears that the Trust has been living a hand-to-mouth existence for a number of years, but the hand is now empty.''