By Marjory Inglis, health reporter

TAYSIDE HEALTH bosses raided charity funds to buy uniforms for thousands of nurses in the region’s hospitals.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds given to buy extra comforts for patients and staff was spent on providing the uniforms, after a decision taken behind closed doors.

The situation was described as a scandal by a leading public services union representative. He feared health boards across Scotland were redirecting charitable donations—known as endowment funds—to subsidise basic health services that should be provided through massive cash allocations from the public purse.

The decision to release up to £400,000 from hospital charity funds to buy the two-piece uniforms for local nurses was confirmed in official documents released by NHS Tayside yesterday.

“People give money to endowments for expenditure on items which are of benefit to patients and staff,” said Robin Hunter, Ninewells Hospital representative of the public services union UNISON.

“There has always been a very clear understanding that it is not intended to cover expenditure which ought to be made from the principal NHS budget.

“I recognise that it is not always easy to draw the boundary between core expenditure and extra comforts but I don’t see how anyone could possibly argue that nurses’ uniforms are not core expenditure and should come out of routine NHS budgets. I am in absolutely no doubt about that.”

The spending of charitable funds on nurses’ uniforms was approved in 2004 but has only now been made public following persistent inquiries by The Courier.

After nurse Pauline Dunnery was attacked by a serial sex offender while on duty in Perth Royal Infirmary in November 2003, health bosses highlighted nurses’ concerns about their uniforms.

At the time they were issued with thin dresses which revealed their underwear and nurses feared the flimsy outfits put them at risk.

Bosses said they would need to find around £1 million to replace all nurses’ uniforms but at no time indicated charitable funds would be raided.

The Courier has campaigned for more openness regarding endowment fund decisions which are taken in private, denying scrutiny of those decisions by the very people who donate money.

NHS Tayside has over £28 million invested in endowment funds and during the last financial year spent nearly £4 million of the income from those investments. The organisation also spends around £2 million a day on health services in Tayside—cash it gets from the Government.

“Charitable funding of £4 million a year is being raided to subsidise a local health budget which is about 20 times greater,” said Mr Hunter. “NHS Tayside has a budget of around three quarters of a billion pounds a year.

“It is one of the major scandals of the NHS generally,” he added.

“Although I have no direct information, I don’t imagine for a moment Tayside is the only health board that does this kind of thing.”

Last night NHS Tayside was asked to explain why uniforms were purchased with charitable funds instead of being provided from the main NHS budget.

“The endowment fund is there for the benefit of both patients and staff,” said NHS Tayside head of communications Shona Singers.

“In this case the trustees decided, following a serious incident in one of our hospitals, that the routine nurses uniform replacement programme should be escalated.

“This one-off endowment allocation allowed us to change all our nurses uniforms from traditional dresses to tunics and trousers much quicker than if we had continued with the normal replacement process.”