Court action warning for board over 'terrible' FOI response times

NHS Forth Valley chiefs have been threatened with unprecedented court action over its failure to comply with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

- STUART MCFARLANE

In a letter addressed to the health board's chief executive Ross McGuffie, the Scottish Information Commissioner David Hamilton is heavily critical of efforts to tackle a continued backlog of late responses - and urges the authority to follow an 'action plan' moving forward.

Mr Hamilton said his office initially opened an intervention into NHS Forth Valley in November 2023 after it reported a failure to respond to 51 per cent of requests within the timeframe of 20 days.

The intervention was escalated in October last year after those performance issues weren't improved and a meeting was then arranged in March where the lack of progress was raised - and extra time given to make improvements.