Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon announced that due to the pressure put on her to make job cuts, she will have to reduce NHS jobs by 4000 over the course of the year. This will of course not appease healthcare recruitment agencies, who are receiving very mix signals about how much cutting the NHS will be expected to do.

The problem is 2 fold here, service and cost saving. Ms Strugeon stated that even though the NHS is and always will be a top priority for the government, the fact that there has been a £500 million cut in the overall Scottish Budget, the NHS actually received a funding increase.

Recruitment agencies would therefore be surprised by this information and why there would be a need for job cuts to be made, not only that but the fact that this could as the Unions warned cause concerns over the level of service that the NHS would provide.

The truth of the matter is the NHS budgets are extremely tight and with such little movement in these budgets they don’t allow for cost increases a clear example of this would be Medicine. The cost of purchasing medicine has increase dramatically and without budgets pricing this in then logically the cost of paying for these drugs has to come from somewhere.

The Scottish Patients Association added that it is not Sturgeon faults that money is in short supply but finds it hard to accept comments from the government saying this will not affect patient care. This implies that there was poor management in place before hand that were just taking on staff for the sake of it, extremely unlikely.

We will of course have to wait and see how these cuts will truly affect the NHS service, but with 1500 nurses and midwifery posts about to disappear, it leaves me to think of only one possible outcome in the service provided.