Remit
The Committee agreed at its meeting on 24 February to issue a questionnaire on NHS Board budgets to all territorial and special health boards.
This year’s survey adopts a different approach to gathering information from boards. Recognising the increasing emphasis placed on performance budgeting, and the challenges in aligning budgets with specific performance measures, the Committee focused on a selected number of performance indicators and gathered evidence in relation to these specific areas.
The indicators that were selected for scrutiny were from the Scottish Government’s National Performance Framework and were chosen to reflect areas of particular interest to the Committee’s wider work programme:
- Increase the proportion of babies with a healthy birth weight
- Improve end of life care
- Reduce emergency admissions.
Some specific questions in relation to palliative care were included to inform the Committee’s forthcoming inquiry in this area. In addition, this year’s survey includes questions specific to the integration of health and social care.
Timetable
The Committee published its report on NHS boards budget scrutiny 2015-16 on 5 October 2015.
On 4 December 2015 the Committee received a received a response from Paul Gray, Director-General Health & Social Care and Chief Executive NHSScotland.
Evidence
Responses from all 14 Territorial Health Boards and eight Special Health Boards are listed below.
Example of questionnaire that was issued:
Territorial Health Boards
On 9 June 2015, the Committee took evidence from NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Dumfries and Galloway, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, NHS Tayside and NHS Western Isles.
On 16 June 2015, the Committee took evidence from the Scottish Government.
On 27 July 2015, the Committee received further evidence from the Scottish Government.