John Gulliver - Hospital independence a great idea?
SHOULD Great Ormond Street Hospital become a foundation trust, making it fairly independent of Whitehall civil servants?
The public are being invited to a meeting at GOSH at midday on Saturday to discuss the possibility.
I don’t want to appear churlish but could the preference to be a trust have anything to do with the millions of pounds the hospital receive annually in charitable donations?
For more than 80 years GOSH have received several millions alone from the estate of the playwright JM Barrie with its copyright to the Peter Pan heritage.
Whitehall policy-makers, I understand, want to claw back charitable donations made to hospitals.
I haven’t anything other than admiration for the splendid staff at GOSH. Their worldwide reputation puts them on a pedestal other hospitals can only envy.
But, understandably, perhaps there are less than altruistic motives behind the move towards a trust.