IN the three days since the Herald broke the story about NHS Tayside and its use of charity funds for IT systems, heads have rolled and eyes have been opened to a little-known area of NHS spending.
Read more: NHS Tayside chief executive sacked over charity cash row
Beyond the leadership shake-up at Tayside, there are surely wider questions to be asked about how the charity donations which fill health boards' endowment funds are managed and invested.
Is the best model to have the executive and non-executive members of health boards double up as the trustees of the endowment fund? Surely that creates an inherent conflict of interest in periods when health board coffers are under strain?
As the Herald reported, a number of non-executive trustees at Tayside - those appointed to scrutinise health board and endowment fund policies - are understood to have challenged this controversial use of charity cash in 2014, but were "threatened and coerced" by executives to agree.
Read more: NHS Tayside axed its own rules to use charity cash to pay for IT systems
Surely it is too easy for chief executives, finance directors and other health board bosses to railroad their non-executive colleagues - councillors, retired healthcare staff and charity workers - into uncomfortable decisions.
Then there are the "grey areas". While transferring £2.7 million from an endowment fund into the exchequer (the health board's core expenditure pot) is unprecedented, can the public really be sure that charity cash is always spent as the donors wished?
For a start, the vast bulk of it is generally invested in stock markets with only the interest actually being spent.
Some health boards are hoarding tens of millions - is that what those who sweated in fun runs or left legacies in their wills would want?
Read more: NHS Tayside 'misrepresented' its accounts for six years
Minutes from a meeting of Tayside's endowment fund in October 2017 also question whether cash donated to a particular facility should always be spent as requested.
The minutes state: “Members must be mindful of the wishes of donors but it was felt that the appropriate thing to do was to gratefully accept the donations without giving any guarantee on the purpose the funds would be spent on.”
The minutes also record the opinion of one trustee that rules around retrospectively funding projects were “fairly fluid". Time for a new rule book, perhaps?
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