NICOLA Sturgeon threw her support behind Shona Robison yesterday after Richard Leonard said it was time for the Health Secretary “to go”.
The Labour leader called on the First Minister to “face up to the fact” that Robison should no longer hold the portfolio.
The call comes in the wake of the NHS Tayside charity funds scandal, which saw the health board use donations to pay for IT systems.
Yesterday Leonard said the board had been “raiding charity funds to pay the bills” and “fiddling the accounts”.
The comments came after Caroline Gardner, the Auditor General for Scotland, said there was a “significant question” about why warnings about the health board’s finances in recent years were not “taken seriously”.
The organisation, which serves Robison’s Dundee City East constituency, has requried £43.5 million of Scottish Government loans in recent years.
Giving evidence to Holyrood’s Public Audit Committee, Gardner said auditors had flagged “unusual” payments four years ago.
She went on: “There is a significant question about why, throughout the NHS system, warnings from auditors are not being taken seriously.
“The reason why is something you would need to ask of Scottish Government and of the board itself.”
During the session, Robison’s predecessor Alex Neil warned it was “inevitable that other deals will have been done that have so far not come to light”. But under pressure from Leonard in the chamber, Sturgeon pledged to continue her “support as First Minister to the job the Health Secretary is doing to strengthen the leadership of the NHS Tayside board”.
This includes pressing senior figures to step aside in the wake of the charity funds row.
Previous chairman Professor John Connell has been replaced as part of the changes and Robison has instructed the new team to win back the trust of the public.
Sturgeon accepted there had been “issues in Tayside for some time” but insisted remedial measures had been put in place.
She added: “At every stage there has been support for NHS Tayside, but when the culmination of issues reached the point it did the Health Secretary rightly decided the leadership of the board required to be strengthened.”
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