CANCER survivors, parents of children saved by organ transplants, or grieving relatives wishing to show their gratitude for the way a loved one was cared for before their death.
These are some of the reasons why members of the public fundraise for the NHS. Many also choose to leave bequests to the NHS in their will. It is a sign of the respect and appreciation in which the health service is still held.
Read more: NHS Tayside used charity cash for IT system
For this cash to be spent on the rollout of a back office computer system is a betrayal of those who donated in the belief that it would help buy staff and patients the "extras" that are not covered in the NHS budget. Toys, armchairs for the day-room, special research.
It is even more ironic that £2.71 million (or as much as £4.3m according to one well-placed source who spoke to the Herald anonymously) should have been plundered from the endowment fund to help pay for an eHealth project at exactly the same time that NHS Tayside had begun siphoning off the £5.3m of taxpayer funds allocated to it specifically to pay for eHealth.
Read more: NHS Tayside used charity cash for IT system
So to be clear: taxpayer cash supposed to spent on eHealth was being used to prop up general expenditure and make NHS Tayside's finances appear more favourable, while charity cash supposed to be spent to the benefit of staff and patients was being spent on eHealth - that is, an IT system.
Funnily enough, none of the Tayside executives hauled before the Scottish Parliament's Public Audit Committee last week (to answer questions on how eHealth money was used) thought to mention this bit of accounting jiggery pokery with the Endowment Fund.
Read more: NHS Tayside used charity cash for IT system
NHS Scotland's chief executive Paul Gray defended NHS Tayside to some extent when he told the committee that the money had been "mis-accounted but not mis-spent". That is, it had been spent to the benefit of patients as opposed to something less worthy - fact-findings junkets to Australia, perhaps?
It seems harder to defend the use of charity money for a computer system that had already been funded by taxpayers - or would have been, if only NHS Tayside had managed its accounts properly.
The case highlights the dangers of a conflict of interest when the same people who sit on the health board - including NHS chief executives - are also trustees of the endowment fund.
But it also begs the question, if the criticism of internal auditors was silenced (as several sources tell the Herald it was) by threats that they would lose their contract, then where exactly is the scrutiny and independence?
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