The prospect of Patricia Hewitt having to fulfil a promise to resign was virtually eliminated yesterday as officials at the Department of Health became increasingly certain that the health service in England will be in surplus when the financial year ends on Saturday.

The NHS chief executive, David Nicholson, ordered the dispersal of £450m from a contingency reserve to bolster the balance sheets of hospitals and primary care trusts. He expects the last-minute injection of resources to push scores of NHS organisations into surplus.

When preliminary accounts are published in May, the combined deficits of those trusts remaining in the red will be seen to have fallen well below £1bn. At the half-year stage, they were forecasting a £1.2bn overspend. Mr Nicholson's decision to switch £450m from one NHS account to others will not affect whether the books balance overall. But it will bolster the government's claim that problems are confined to a minority of trusts. Financial crisis was averted by cost-cutting across the service during the winter, including job losses, ward closures and postponement of operations.

In November Ms Hewitt was asked by MPs on the Commons health select committee if NHS overspending put her job at risk. She replied: "I have said we will return the NHS as a whole to financial balance by the end of March and I will take personal responsibility for that."

Mr Nicholson said yesterday that NHS finances were secure enough to scrap "resource accounting" rules that were forcing the most financially troubled hospitals into technical bankruptcy, as disclosed by a Guardian investigation in December.

He allocated £178m to 28 trusts which were penalised in 2006-07 for overspending during the previous year. The biggest rescue packages included £23m for Queen Elizabeth hospital in south-east London and £24m for North West London Hospitals NHS trust. However, they will remain under a statutory obligation to make surpluses in future years to compensate for past overspending.