Scotland’s cash-strapped NHS is under fire for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds hiring professional actors to pretend to be patients.
The Scottish Mail on Sunday can reveal that a body called NHS Education for Scotland is setting aside an astonishing £360,000 to pay actors and role-players to impersonate people with illnesses and medical conditions.
The body claims the fake patients have a vital role to play in training doctors and nurses.
But at a time when 850,000 people in Scotland are currently on a waiting list for NHS treatment, including diagnostic tests, critics said spending cash on actors was a waste of precious resources.
Meanwhile the health service is facing dire warnings over its financial future.
And Callum McGoldrick, investigations manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance campaign group said: ‘Spending more than £300,000 on professional actors to play patients while more than half a million Scots sit on NHS waiting lists is completely backwards.
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