NHS Tayside has been urged to use its endowment fund to help pay for potentially life-saving treatment abroad for a seriously ill Dundee boy.
Seven-year-old Garvie Winter was diagnosed with leukaemia in October last year and has undergone five rounds of chemotherapy.
This has failed to arrest his cancer and his family is now trying to raise £95,000 so he can undergo groundbreaking Car T Cell therapy in Italy.
Traditionally, cancer is treated with surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
However, Car T Cell therapy trains a person’s own immune system to fight the disease. Although still a new and relatively untested treatment, it has had notable success in fighting blood cancers.
Garvie’s family has already raised over £80,000 to help fly the Fintry Primary SChool pupil to Italy for the treatment and now Dundee-based Labour MSP Jenny Mara is urging NHS Tayside to meet the rest of the cost.
Doctors recommended the treatment to Garvie’s family and Ms Marra has suggested the health board should use cash from its endowment fund to meet the cost of the treatment.
NHS Tayside had to repay money into its endowment fund after it emerged it had dipped into the fund to pay for projects including a new IT system.
Former chairman John Connell and ex-chairwoman Lesley McLay both lost their jobs after misuse of the endowment funds, which had been sanctioned by the NHS board, became public.
In a letter to new NHS Tayside chairman John Brown, Ms Marra wrote: “I understand that Garvie will not be receiving any further treatment in Scotland to treat his leukaemia and that having Car T Cell therapy is their last hope.
“The family have raised almost half of this money. To my mind, the NHS should be paying for this treatment or NHS Tayside’s Endowment Fund.
“As we both know, the Endowment Fund was misappropriated over the last few years and has now been set right.
“I am firmly of the belief that young Garvie’s treatment is exactly the kind of thing that the people of Dundee would like their charitable donations to go towards.
“When our own NHS is seemingly unable to provide a treatment for a young boy, it would be an excellent use of the Endowment Fund to step in and meet half these costs.”
Ms Marra has also written to new Scottish government health secretary Jeanne Freeman about Garvie’s plight.
Garvie’s mum Haley, 32, said: “This is something that would help.
“It would be amazing and would stop all the worrying.”
She added: “We have £80,000 now but need £95,000 for the first treatment.”
A spokeswoman for NHS Tayside said: “We would like to be as supportive as possible to the Winter family. We will be carefully considering what support, including financial support, we can offer for Garvie’s ongoing treatment.”
She added an independent board would need to approve any use of money from the health board’s endowment fund.
She said: “The Tayside Health Fund is a charity fund that is independent of NHS Tayside. Any request for funding would have to be submitted to be considered by the charity’s Board of Trustees.”
