PLAID ATTACK HEALTH BOARD AFTER £2M BILL REVEALED
MORE than 80 new nurses could have been hired with the £2 million spent by a health board on management consultants in little more than a year.
That is the claim made by Plaid Cymru after a Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealed the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board had employed 37 consultant companies since September 2018 at a cost of £2,077,023.
The new figures come after our sister paper, the Daily Post revealed the health board paid interim recovery director Phillip Burns £2,000 a day – for one day a week working from his luxury home in Marbella.
Plaid Cymru’s North Wales AM Llyr Gruffydd said: “I’ve been doing some more digging into the murky world of management consultants within the health board and the bad news is that ‘Marbella Man’ [Mr Burns] is not the only expensive management consultant being employed by Betsi.
“In the last year alone, 37 have been employed at an average cost of £714 per day.
“The health board has been reluctant to supply all the details but we know that 20 of the 37 were paid a total of £2,077,023.
“We’re still waiting to find out how much the other 17 were paid.
“That’s on top of the wages of senior managers and the money that will go to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“I’ve also asked the Labour Government in Cardiff about their role in this and the proposal to make nurses work longer shifts.
“The answer is that ‘it’s operational’ and nothing to do with them. Really? This is a health board that’s been in special measures for almost five years and is therefore under the direct control of the Health Vaughan Gething and
“We also need the health board and Welsh Government to explain why it’s using so many expensive consultants to run our NHS, when that money could be spent on frontline staff.”
Corporate accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers was paid £335,616 for its work with the health board. It is also due to be paid one-ninth of all the savings it identifies for the organisation.
Gary Doherty, Betsi’s chief executive, said: “Our priority is to deliver considerable improvements in unscheduled care,
Minister his officials. planned care and financial management, and to achieve this we are temporarily strengthening our existing capacity and expertise in these areas. “Interim staff have been appointed in accordance with our standing financial instructions to undertake specific roles for a short period of time. “Appointing a recovery director was a recommendation from the National Assembly’s public accounts committee, who called for more resources to be devoted to turnaround action, including bringing in additional specialist external turnaround expertise.”