NHS Scotland Health Boards to be cut from 14 to 2

[Strictlysober]

What do people think of this? I have to say that I'm worried.

NHS Scotland Reform: Health Boards Cut from 14 to 2

Scotland has 14 health boards for a population of 5.5 million people.

England has 36 health boards for a population of 59 million people.

Maybe we don't need as many.

The NHS definitely needs reform but as it stands I’ve never met a public service worker who has nothing or little to do. Quite the reverse.

I think your focus on saving money versus the impact on the wider social implications is misplaced.

Why do you think they are doing it? There is a truly vast black hole in Scotlands finances coming down the tracks. It’s good that they’re getting stuck in but they really cannot afford to worry about social consequences - the money simply isn’t there.

Do the maths - maybe we need more than 2?

Why? Why do we need more than one?

Because Scotland is a large and diverse geographical area. If we had only one health board it would be centralised and rural areas would get an even worse service than they do now.

Consultations are a total waste of time anyway, they are just for show, cost money, and theyt do whatever they wanted to do anyway.

It won't make any difference to the NHS which is totally unfit for purpose, it's tinkering around the edges. Pretty much par for the course for the SNP though.

There is absolutely no logic to reorganisation of the health boards (please don't call if 'reform' - the Scot Gov can't even specifically say what they want to 'reform'). We'll end up with MORE managers, not less. They seem to think that merging areas like payroll will a) be easy b) save money - but in reality it's unlikely that an 'East' payroll dept for Lothian, Grampian, Tayside, Borders & Fife will magically be smaller that their current individual depts combined. I would be willing to bet on it being more rubbish though.

This also will not magically make computer systems in different health boards talk to each other. The different boards have individual contracts with IT suppliers and are tied into these. They can't just jump ship and join some amazing East Scotland NHS IT system (which doesn't exist anyway). It'd occasionally be useful to see records from another health board, but for the very large majority of patients I see it is irrelevant as all their treatment is in their local area. Can you imagine if we did have a Scotland wide NHS IT system & Russia/Iran/insert enemy country here/Skynet hacked it!

It’s nuts to have multiple payroll teams though, finance teams, procurement teams, estates teams, multiple HR teams, multiple Isla Bumbas when they all do the same thing. Surely you can see that? There are economies of scale that we need to be tapping into. Surely if one health board has a very diverse catchment then you teach that health board the intricacies of those different areas of catchment rather than have lots of little health boards.

If you're saying what I think you're saying, that doesn't make sense. Large organisations need large numbers of HR staff. Small organisations need a couple of HR staff. That's because they deal with disciplinary and grievance issues in respect of individual members of staff, and the more staff you have, the more issues there are. You can't just ask the same couple of HR staff to do all the work when you triple the size of the organisation, for instance. And they really need to be near the managers and employees they're dealing with, anyway. The same with other areas. An estate team in Dundee deals with all the buildings in Dundee. If you tell them they're now dealing with the hospital in Inverness, they'll find it impossible. They can't be driving up to Inverness every couple of days to deal with repairs to a building or whatever, because they're based in Dundee and they've got enough to do there.
Or do you mean something else? Please clarify.