Health bosses in Tayside and Fife have come under pressure to slash the hundreds of thousands of pounds they spend on hospitality and invest in frontline nurses.
At a time when both NHS Tayside and NHS Fife are planning massive job cuts to balance the books, it emerged on Sunday that both organisations have racked up huge bills for entertaining staff and visitors £804,148 in Tayside and £743,211 in Fife over the last three years.
Tayside’s hospitality budget is equivalent to the salaries of 39 newly-qualified nurses.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance has accused the health authorities of having their priorities all wrong.
A spokesman said, “With NHS budgets under pressure, the first priority should be frontline nurses and vital life-saving drugs, so the idea money has been put into entertainment when these things are under threat shows the priorities are wrong.”
NHS Tayside has said it will have to cut around 500 jobs, including nursing posts, to make £30 million of savings this year alone and has warned of tough times ahead.
Only NHS Greater Glasgow, the largest health authority in Scotland, spent more on hospitality than NHS Tayside. Its bill was £852,000.
Dundee MSP Joe FitzPatrick said he expected the budget to be “squeezed” to protect vital services.
The SNP politician said he would contact NHS Tayside to find out what the hospitality budget was spent on.
“This seems like an awful lot of money but I don’t know exactly what this covers,” he said.”Unjustifiable” costsHealth boards in Scotland spent almost £4 million on hospitality, according to figures obtained by the Labour Party under freedom of information legislation.
Labour’s shadow Scottish health minister Dr Richard Simpson said the costs were “unjustifiable.”
Labour MSP Marlyn Glen said, “In the current economic climate, the priorities for the NHS are patient care and the preservation of jobs. Hospitality budgets must therefore be subject to rigorous scrutiny to further these priorities.”
Conservative health spokeswoman Mary Scanlon said NHS Lanarkshire halved its hospitality budget last year and she saw no reason why Tayside and Fife couldn’t make savings.
But she said she wouldn’t expect a “zero budget” as Ninewells Hospital in Dundee is a respected teaching hospital that attracts national and international visitors.
An NHS Tayside spokeswoman said, “All expenditure across the organisation is coded against different categories and what would be coded against hospitality is not necessarily what the public would perceive is hospitality.
“For example, hospitality would include organised events for our volunteers, national and international medical conferences held here in Tayside which make sure we continue to attract the best doctors and clinicians to come and work here in Tayside.”
She added, “However, this year, given the current financial climate for public sector bodies, our chief operating officer has ordered all managers to look at their budgets, including hospitality to make sure that every penny spent from the public purse is justified and will ultimately benefit patient care.”
Amid accusations of hospitality budgets being used for “wining and dining”, the spokeswoman gave an absolute assurance that NHS Tayside’s hospitality budget included no spending on alcohol.