Structure
There are seven Local Health Boards (LHBs) in Wales and three national NHS Trusts. Each LHB is responsible for delivering all NHS healthcare services within a geographical area. Three NHS Trusts, called 'all-Wales trusts', operate nationwide agencies and services. These are: the Welsh Ambulance Service, Velindre NHS Trust (providing a range of specialist services at local, regional and All Wales levels, including the Welsh Blood Service and specialist cancer services), and Public Health Wales.
The current Health Boards were created on 1 October 2009 following a reorganisation of NHS Wales that saw the abolition of 22 Local Health Boards (LHBs) and seven NHS Trusts that had existed since 2003. Since the reorganisation Health Boards are responsible for delivering all NHS services, rather than the two-tiered Trust and LHB system that existed previously.
Wales' largest teaching hospital, the University Hospital of Wales based in Cardiff is the largest hospital outside London and third largest in the United Kingdom.
Read more about this topic: NHS Wales
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“The question is still asked of women: “How do you propose to answer the need for child care?” That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: “If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?””
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)