Talking-up Scotland

The above Freedom of Information response has just been published and it’s a hoot. It’s anonymous so we don’t know whether the attempt to trawl for bad news about NHS Scotland came from Labour, Tories, LibDems, BBC, Scotsman, Herald or whichever desperate crew. You’ll see that the FoI office might be getting a bit fed up with the applicant’s determination to find something, anything and in the process waste public money. Here’s the question:

‘You asked for any correspondence (letters, emails or otherwise) dated from 1 September – 1 December 2018 from nurses to Nicola Sturgeon on any of the following topics: excessive workload, staff cuts, Scottish Government funding, poor workforce planning, or job satisfaction.’

The response was:

‘You have previously made this same request for a broader timescale and been advised that the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, NHS Scotland’s health boards are among the largest employers in Scotland and many of their employees write to the First Minister every year. Details of which correspondents are nurses are not held by the Scottish Government as we are neither the direct employer nor the regulator of the profession. In an effort to be helpful (😊) we have examined only where a correspondent has clearly self-identified as a nurse – although we should observe that we have no way of verifying that this is the case.’

Delightfully, they could only find one:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-19-00057/

‘Crisis as at least one nurse goes for early retirement!’

‘Crisis as not enough nurses complain to….’