£70,000 bill for health board staff trips abroad

Two special health boards spent more than £70,000 on foreign trips for staff last year.

A Freedom of Information request from the Labour Party revealed NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (QIS) spent 43,129 on 21 separate trips in 2009-10, to attend conferences in destinations including Singapore, Nice and Orlando.

The most expensive individual trip was 6,505 to send a single member of staff to Boston for a programme on patient safety.

NHS Health Scotland spent 29,378 in 2010 on 42 trips to destinations including Venice, Toronto and Madrid.

The figures show that NHS Forth Valley was the highest spending territorial health board that responded to the request, spending 26,285 last year on 36 separate trips to foreign destinations. Dumfries and Galloway spent 23,444 on 37 trips.

Labour's Jackie Baillie MSP, who requested the figures, said: "In tough financial times we need to make sure that our focus is on patient care and every penny is spent in the most efficient way.

"It is impossible to justify spending tens of thousands of pounds on foreign travel."

In response to figures, health secretary Nicola Sturgeon said: "Everyone working in the health service should recognise the tight financial constraints on the NHS in Scotland. Health board managers are expected to think very carefully before signing off on any foreign travel."

A spokesman for NHS QIS said the role of the organisation is to improve the quality of healthcare in Scotland.

He added: "In order to do this, it is necessary to learn from the successes demonstrated by health services abroad, bringing that knowledge back to Scotland in order to improve healthcare within our own NHS."

NHS Health Scotland added: "The majority of our international travel is associated with our work with the EU, World Health Organisation (WHO) and other international partners."