Another Monday, another shock-horror revelation from Conservative MSPs.
This time it’s about agency nurses employed in the Scottish NHS. The report
provided to the Herald by the Tories (Row as hospitals pay more than £1,500
per shift for agency nurses to fill rotas – 23 January 2017) is sadly short of detail.
Exactly how many times were these eye-watering sums paid out last year?
Three times? Three hundred? Three thousand? But of course that kind of exactness
is unlikely to shock readers the way that big sums like £1,565 or £1,528 paid to agencies
(that’s not what the nurses get, I hasten to add) will do. I suppose the average
payment to an agency is not quoted because it would be too low to cause a fuss. And
I suppose I should be grateful that the Health Minister gets a chance - right at the end -
to point out that the use of agency nurses is dropping and has been for a decade.
I’ve got questions I’d like to put to the people who produce this FoI stuff: is this really
what Conservative MSPs do? Sit in Holyrood and fire off Freedom of Information
requests? And do they really think the voters/tax payers are so dense we don’t notice
how the information is skewed to make it look like public services in Scotland are going
to hell in a handcart? Or that we don’t realise that the constant demand for data through
FoI requests ties up staff time which the tax payer ultimately has to pay for: every FoI
request has to be written and submitted by a member of the MSP’s staff (whose salary
we pay) and then dealt with by members of staff in the public body (also paid by the
tax payer). If in the end this is all the Tories can come up with, I’m not sure they're giving
us value for money.
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