Briefing Note on NHS Highland for New Staff Members

National Health Service Highland (NHS Highland) is a public sector organisation and is classed as being in the Tertiary Sector as it provides a service to the public rather than producing a tangible product. NHS Highland serves a population of approximately 310,000 residents and provides a wide range of services across the largest land area (~40%) of any health authority in Scotland.

NHS Highland is managed by a Board of Executive and Non-Executive Directors and is accountable to the Scottish Government through the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing.

The main services provided by NHS Highland are: Healthcare, in the form of General Practitioner Surgeries, Hospital …show more content…

Technological - NHS Highland have adopted the Lean method (Lean is an improvement approach to improve flow and eliminate waste that was developed by Toyota. Lean is basically about getting the right things to the right place, at the right time, in the right quantities, while minimising waste and being flexible and open to change). In the advancements of Technology over the years, scanners and email have increasingly helped to speed up the transportation of documents, meaning jobs can be carried out a lot quicker and also reduces the amount of hard copies of these documents, saving money on paper, postage and printing costs.

Legal - Changes in employments laws can effect terms and conditions that are already in place, meaning policies and procedures need to be adapted to reflect the new laws and amendments to contracts issued. For example national minimum wage increases means the cost to NHS increases to reflect this rise, not only in affected employees salaries but also if there are a variety of contributory pension schemes, the organisations’ contribution may vary greatly between the relevant schemes.

Environment - NHS Highland has a large amount of rural communities and therefore it is difficult to recruit to certain roles in these rural areas, many taking 3 or 4 lots of