A senior NHS Highland pharmacist jetted off to Salt Lake City four times in four months to learn about “quality improvement”, which included training for a scheme to cut patient travel to Inverness.
The week-long trips to the Utah state capital in the US took place between February and May last year – a total distance of 35,752 miles – at a cost of £5,505.96 to the taxpayer in flights and hotel bills.
The trips were part of an air travel bill of £158,164 at budget-cutting NHS Highland between July 2016 and the end of February this year. Most of the flights were within Scotland to the islands or central belt, as staff assist in the transport of patients, attend training courses and provide medical cover across the country.
But 43 foreign flights – with a price tag of £18,360 – were booked by the health board over the 20-month period, with other destinations visited including Seattle, Madrid, Vienna, Amsterdam and Stockholm.
And an NHS Highland spokesman said a lead pharmacist went to the world-leading Intermountain Institute for Healthcare Delivery in Salt Lake City and completed an advanced, four part training programme in quality improvement, a “specific outcome” of which was testing and developing the ongoing NHS Near Me programme.
Near Me allows north patients to attend clinics – assisted by a healthcare professional – to use video consulting technology to have consultations, instead of spending hours travelling to Inverness and risking cancellations due to bad weather.
Caithness Health Action Team (Chat) chairman Bill Fernie described the programme, which was initiated in Caithness last year, as a “great thing” but added: “It begs the question, should they not have done the training by video conference? People in Caithness I know are speaking to relatives in Australia, New Zealand and Canada and not going to the places themselves.
“With the budget deficit they are seeing, I think it’s hard to justify all these long trips. I am not saying all of these trips are not appropriate but I think the public will be a little perturbed.”
An NHS Highland spokesman stressed that the training was not just about Near Me, and that the staff member will have “different leadership roles” in “quality improvement” in the future.
And he said that the course itself is only available as a “face-to-face” taught course and that it would have been challenging to attend such long sessions by video-conference from 7.30am to 5pm each day for a week at a time.
The spokesman also said that video-conferencing would have prevented both seeing the service provision in action and networking, highlighting that a key member of the Intermountain telehealth programme on the course has made regular contact with NHS Highland since.
He added that the member of staff is also applying the knowledge developed through the training programme in a new post.