There has been coverage in a few newspapers over recent days about allocations of money from health board endowment funds.
Our Board Chairman, John Brown, and the Chair of NHSGGCs Endowment’s Management Committee, Ian Ritchie, felt it important to reassure the public and NHS staff who contribute to these charitable funds that there is good governance and scrutiny of applications and also that the general endowments fund has a breadth of appropriate areas of funding which include research as well as patient and staff projects that would not be covered under core NHS funding.
Some commentators have described endowments as a patient funded charity that should be used only for patient extras beyond what would normally be provided for by NHS core funding. In part – this is true – but it is only part of the picture.
The whole picture of our Endowments Fund is that it is for patient and staff amenities and also for research work which would not normally be provided from NHS exchequer funds.
The endowment fund receives money from a number of sources including money bequeathed from patients or their families for specific or general purposes, or from the wills of former staff to further the work or research they were involved in during their career or an area of specific interest to them… or indeed from any source for the benefit of NHS staff, or research or patient benefit.
The Endowments Management Committee, whose members are mostly non-executive board members with a wide range of professional and life experience, carefully scrutinises and questions all applications.
Three examples of approved endowment funding applications which have attracted media comment in recent days include:
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Endowments is a charity of over 2000 funds for the benefit of patients and staff. Funds are used for equipment, patients comforts and amenities, research and training together with the provision of extra facilities and opportunities not available from government funding.
Details of what endowments funds have been used for are also freely available on our public website: www.nhsggc.org.uk/media/242656/item-06-endowments-funds-accounts.pdf
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